A cinderblock wall of a condo under construction in downtown Langley City collapsed onto a nearby car dealership early Saturday morning.
The wall collapsed sometime around 1:30 a.m. according to accounts on social media from people who heard the crash. It came in the middle of a wind storm that hit the Lower Mainland, knocking out power to thousands of people and tearing down tree branches.
The site was for a six-storey mixed-use condo building being built by Whitetail Homes. When it collapsed it fell onto the property of the King of Cars dealership, crushing at least one pickup truck.
The wall that came down wasn’t a structural component of the building itself, said Whitetail Homes project coordinator Tessa Hiebert.
It was a firewall that was being built between the Whitetail site and the neighbouring lot to prevent fires from spreading. The lot next door does not yet have a condo building, but that entire area is intended for more residential and mixed-use development due to its proximity to the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain line.
The site was built to BC Building Code standards and the specifications were set by a structural engineer, Hiebert said.
“In the coming weeks, we’ll be working with engineering and our masonry contractor to establish what happened, and to build back better,” she said.
As of Tuesday morning, the debris had been mostly cleaned up.
The Langley Advance Times has reached out to King of Cars and WorkSafeBC about the incident.
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