Collapse
About fifty people were on the top wooden balcony at the time of the collapse. According to one witness, the sound of splintering wood was heard immediately before the collapse, which occurred shortly after midnight local time. The collapse started on the third floor, pulling down other balconies below. The first, second, and third floor balconies all collapsed into the basement below, carrying a total of approximately one hundred people among them. Several people were also trapped in a basement stairwell. Survivors helped to pull victims out from under the debris of the balconies, and rescue workers had to use chainsaws to free others. One of the survivors was a nurse, and had started a rescue effort before the emergency services arrived. The Chicago Fire Department supplied the main rescue effort. Eleven people were killed in the collapse, with two more subsequently dying while hospitalized; fifty-seven people were injured.
Read more about this topic: 2003 Chicago Balcony Collapse
Famous quotes containing the word collapse:
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)
“I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I’ll be all right; I’ve got a few veg.”
—Margaret Drabble (b. 1939)
“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)