MLC - Montana 56’ Casino Deck Collapse

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RETURN TO MY DECK FAILURE DIRECTORY PAGE

Introduction

The Mountain Cabin

Building a Safe Deck - This Old House Article

A Safe Deck - My Opinion

My Neighbor's’s Experience

Deck Collapse Kills Woman At Wedding Party

Wedding Balcony Collapse

Deck Collapse W/Kiddie Pool

Montana 56’ Casino Deck Collapse

Deck Failure Directory

PLEASE NOTE: This following was excerpted from the Monday Morning Marketer, a newsletter specifically written for Home Inspectors.

DECK COLLAPSE INJURES SCORES

WARNING: This article is an account of another deck failure. Please check your own deck for rot, wood destroying insects, and inadequate securment to the home.

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following accounts are from a major deck collapse in Montana on July 30, 2004. I have included 3 different perspectives. The first is a technical failure account from the well respected Journal of Light Construction. The second deals with the ensuing lawsuits. The third is the account from the local newspaper. I originally reprinted this article in the Monday Morning Marketer, a newsletter specifically written for Home Inspectors.

Reprinted with permission from the September2004 issue of The Journal of Light Construction

Deck Collapse Injures Scores - Ledger splits from faulty lag screw installation

Summer seldom passes without at least one report of a serious structural failure of an outdoor deck, with large numbers of casualties. Unfortunately, the summer of 2004 is no exception: On July 30, a wood deck collapsed suddenly under the weight of a party crowd at the Diamond Horseshoe Casino in Polson, Mont., injuring dozens of people and sending four with life-threatening injuries to hospitals by helicopter.

Area hospitals were flooded with injured, according to a report by Sherry Devlin of the Missoulian newspaper. "In addition to the four life-threatening injuries, three others were classified as critical and 27 as non-life-threatening by EMTs on the scene," writes Devlin. "At least 20 other people arrived at Polson's St. Joseph Hospital in cars and pickup trucks soon after the accident, and another 20 sought medical help during the day on Saturday." Nurses set up a triage center on the St. Joseph's hospital lawn to handle the overflow, according to Devlin's report. Emergency crews responded from five nearby towns, some ambulances driving an hour over rural roads to reach the scene.


Lag screws and fragments of the split ledger board remain attached to the building, and the mostly intact deck lies on the ground below, in these photos taken the morning after the structure's sudden collapse sent dozens of injured to the hospital.

Ledger failure. Not surprisingly, the Montana collapse was traced to a failure of the connection point between the deck and the building. Hired by the city of Polson to investigate, architect Paul Bishop of Building Solutions LLC, reported that the deck's untreated Douglas fir ledger "failed downward and outward as a result of vertical loading well below the maximum allowed by the building code."

"My conclusions were threefold," Bishop told JLC in a telephone interview. "The initial problem was that the ledger was attached directly to the siding with no weather protection. That allowed moisture to get between it and the building, and it began to rot. The second issue was that the lag screws were too few and far between, and they were driven through the ledger with a rotary hammer rather than through pre-drilled holes, which induced a splitting force. And then, all of the screws were in exactly the same plane, so that the splitting force was aligned along the entire 57 feet of ledger. The straw that broke the camel's back was that the builder used 2x8 joist hangers on a 2x12, so that all of the weight was distributed to that ledger below that plane of lag bolts."

The deck collapsed after midnight Friday night, and Bishop inspected the wreckage the next morning with a group of town officials. "When I got there, I saw that the ledger had basically unzipped itself," he says. "There were fragments of ledger on the building, and the rest of the ledger remained securely fastened to the deck, which remained intact, on the concrete patio below." Two loud cracking noises, heard by people on the deck just before the collapse, must have been the sound of the ledger splitting, says Bishop: "I didn't see anything else broken."

A morning-after photo shows the bottom half of the split ledger board still attached to the otherwise intact deck assembly.

Evidence removal. Paul Bishop is the only architect in the county surrounding Polson. "And I knew that the only engineer in the county was on vacation," he said. "That's why I offered my services to the town on Saturday morning." Bishop made his inspection barely in time to view the scene undisturbed: By Saturday afternoon, the building owner had allegedly hired a local firm to cut the wreckage up and take it to the landfill. Police have reportedly opened a criminal investigation, centering in part on "exfoliation" (illegal removal) of evidence. At least one victim has already filed a civil lawsuit. "There will probably be condos there instead of a casino, in the end," said one town official.

Bishop says, "My firm has been hired to go to the landfill and retrieve every scrap of the deck and put it into storage. Ultimately it may be reconstructed, the way they put crashed airplanes together." At the bottom of the pile of debris, he said, was a significant find: "We got some pieces of split ledger that showed weathering around the fasteners. Maybe at some previous event where there were a lot of people on the deck, the ledger split partially, and then water was able to get in there and discolor the split. And then there were some areas of raw wood where it really split when it collapsed. But the thing had been trying to tear itself apart for some time."

Lag screws driven through the centerline of the deck ledger created a critical split line in the member, which was loaded below that line by undersized joist hangers, according to an architect's report. When the ledger suddenly split, the deck toppled out and down, injuring dozens of people.

In the immediate aftermath of the collapse, a lawyer for the building owner had pointed to the fact that the deck was inspected in recent years by fire officials, and passed. But Bishop says those inspections had no relation to the deck's structural integrity. "The fire department inspects for things like if their fire extinguishers are charged, if their emergency and exit lights function, if their exits weren't blocked by keno machines — it was a very cursory kind of a thing." The fire inspectors aren't trained to evaluate structure, he said.

Allowable load vs. occupancy. The misunderstanding points up a common source of confusion in reporting about deck failures: the difference between a deck's allowable occupant load and its required structural bearing capacity. The two unrelated issues are addressed in different chapters of the code: Occupancy is part of the safe egress requirements, while deck bearing capacity is a structural issue.

Bishop and Polson Fire Chief Thomas Maloney had to thrash the issues out as they probed the Polson failure. "It took a little time for him to explain it to me," says Maloney. "He kept telling me that by code, the deck should support more people than could fit onto it. And I kept saying, 'I don't care if you could park ten Abrams M-1 tanks up there — they aren't allowed to have that many people on it."

The issue of whether the deck had more people on it than its permitted occupancy load is debatable, but irrelevant, says Bishop. "A lot more people wanted to be outside on the deck that night than wanted to be inside the building, so it was loaded. I don't think it was over the code max, but the bar owner can say that the number of people made it fail, and that is true in a sense. But by code it should hold more than that weight. And given enough time, it could have collapsed under two people some day, the way it was deteriorating and coming apart."

Bishop draws lessons from the catastrophe. "The way the building code is structured," he points out, "nobody is going to come back and re-inspect that deck for you over the years. You have one chance to do it right — when it is first built and inspected. The contractor and the carpenters and the inspectors — you need to have a conscience about what you are doing. It is so simple to do it right, but the consequences of doing it wrong are so grave."

"A lot of people, especially in rural areas, moan and complain about the building code," Bishop comments. "'Oh, the building code, the building inspector, that miserable son of a bitch.' But that building code is the basic threshold standard for safety, as far as I am concerned. We have absolutely nothing else to protect us, even from ourselves, but that building code. And when guys just flout it — I mean, this particular deck was something you wouldn't want on the back of a trailer house."

The disaster could have been far worse, he observes: "That deck was filled with young people, athletes who were in town for a basketball tournament. Even so, there were some hideous injuries. If it had been a wedding party, with elderly people, a lot of them would not have survived."

SUITS FILED FROM DECK COLLAPSE

The www.MontanaStandard.com reported at http://www.mtstandard.com/articles/2004/08/25/newsstate_top/hjjfjbhejcgcee.txt

POLSON — Five lawsuits have been filed so far in Lake County District Court seeking reimbursement for medical expenses and monetary damages resulting from the July 30 collapse of an outdoor deck at the Diamond Horseshoe Lounge and Grill in Polson.

The Polson Police Department also is continuing an investigation of the deck collapse. The results of that investigation will be handed over to the Polson city attorney sometime early in September for possible prosecution, Police Chief Doug Chase said Monday.

Officials investigate the wreckage of a balcony that collapsed July 30 at Diamond Horseshoe Lounge and Grill in Polson. Five lawsuits seeking reimbursement for medical expenses and monetary damages have been filed so far.

Chase would not speculate about what criminal charges, if any, might ultimately be filed.

Some 80 people were treated at area hospitals from injuries received in the deck collapse.

Meanwhile, an attorney for Jim Clatterbuck, who had been named by city officials as the recipient of a 1990 building permit for construction of the deck, has denied his client had anything to do with that particular deck's construction.

Polson officials have blamed the collapse on "shoddy construction.''

"The deck that collapsed was either built by (Diamond Horseshoe owner) Mr. (Bert) Shultz himself or by a contractor other than my client,'' Whitefish lawyer Judah Gersh asserted in a recent letter to the Missoulian. He said a building permit issued in 1988 to Shultz for a "building remodel and deck'' was evidence supporting this assertion.

But Polson Building Official Ron Melvin reiterated this week his conclusion that the deck was built in 1990, under the authority of building

permits issued to Jim Clatterbuck Construction. Melvin said that the 1988 building permit for a deck Gersh referred to had a completely different configuration and was planned for a different location on the building than the one that actually collapsed.

Melvin showed the Missoulian documents and architectural drawings from the city's files for both the 1988 and 1990 permits that supported his conclusion.

The architectural drawings in the file for the 1988 building permit show a three-level deck comprised of two landings, and a larger hexagonal structure between them, all connected by stairs. This deck plan extends outward from the building toward Flathead Lake.

In contrast, the drawings for the 1990 permit obtained by Clatterbuck show an exterior deck and railing adjoining and parallel to a new addition on the Diamond Horseshoe, and running parallel to the lakeshore. This is the location and configuration of the deck that collapsed, according to Melvin and other officials who have inspected the site.

The deck shown in the 1988 building permit was actually constructed, but apparently was removed sometime in the mid-1990s, people familiar with the story of the Diamond Horseshoe said.

Shultz's attorney, Matt O'Neill of Polson, said he has witnesses who will testify that the deck that collapsed was built by Clatterbuck or one of his employees or subcontractors during the 1990 expansion of the Diamond Horseshoe.

At O'Neill's suggestion, the Missoulian contacted a contemporary witness to the 1990 construction of the Diamond Horseshoe project who is not involved in litigation or the factual dispute.

Tom Orchard of Polson was the first tenant in the 1990 Diamond Bar expansion, operating Orchard's Landing Restaurant in the newly constructed addition. Orchard told the Missoulian that he recalled Clatterbuck as the general contractor who built the entire 1990 addition, including the deck that collapsed in July.

The deck was on the outside of an addition to the building constructed in 1990, so it couldn't have been the 1988 deck authorized by the Shultz building permit that collapsed, Orchard said.

A spokeswoman for Clatterbuck referred a Missoulian reporter to Gersh for comment on this factual dispute. Gersh did not return telephone calls Monday and Tuesday.

The deck collapsed shortly after midnight July 30, while some 80 to 100 people were on the structure. They fell about eight feet to a concrete slab below in a tangle of arms, legs and broken bones. Many were injured, some seriously enough to be hospitalized for several days. No fatalities resulted.

Building official Melvin and a separate report by an architect hired by the city to inspect the premises after the deck collapsed say the deck was built without the ledger board holding the deck to the wall of the building adequately protected from the weather, exposing the ledger board to dry rot.

Also, metal joist hangers holding the decking to the ledger board were installed on the lower half of the ledger board, adding stress. And lag bolts holding the ledger board to the building were installed in a straight line down the grain of the board, weakening it. It is along this line that the ledger board split, causing the collapse.

"With the dry rot that was observed on the ledger, the lack of lag bolts holding the ledger to the exterior of the structure, the settlement of the foundation, and the load imposed by the occupancy of the deck (my conclusion is) that without major repair this deck would have collapsed if not this night, but at some time,'' Melvin concluded in his report.

The five plaintiffs in the personal injury lawsuits filed so far are from Missoula, Polson, and from as far away as Scottsdale, Ariz., according to filings in the Lake County Clerk of Court's office in Polson.

One of the lawsuits claims that the collapse of the deck "is prima facie (at first examination) proof of negligence.''

No dollar amount of damages is sought or specified in any of the lawsuits. Rather the plaintiffs seek compensation for past and future medical bills, loss of earnings, loss of established course of life, and monetary awards for physical and mental pain and suffering.

The defendant in each case is Diamond Horseshoe Lounge and Grill LLC, owned by Polson businessman Shultz. Shultz's attorney O'Neill said Monday that the business has adequate insurance coverage. O'Neill has not made a formal response as yet to any of the filings.

Police Chief Chase said the investigation has not yet determined how many people were on the deck at the time of the collapse, or if any patrons under the legal drinking age of 21 were on the deck when it collapsed or in the bar illegally. He said he did not know if the deck had a legal "occupancy'' limit as did the bar and grill inside the structure.

Melvin stated in his report that building code requires that decks must be designed to the same "live load'' as the occupancy.

Extrapolating from the interior occupancy regulations to the deck, in terms of square feet required, would give the occupant load of the deck as approximately 45 occupants, Melvin said in his report to Polson Fire Chief Tom Maloney. He said this was a tentative conclusion, open to future review.

Hospital officials have confirmed that at least 80 people were treated for numerous injuries that night and morning. They have also confirmed that a number of the injured treated that night were under 21 years of age.

Chase said that under a provision of Montana's casino gambling laws, underage patrons of the establishment may have been in the place legally, if they were between the ages of 18 and 21, and had the bar owner's permission to be there.

He said some underage patrons have been interviewed, but they have been reluctant to name anyone else who was under 21 and present in the bar on the deck when it collapsed. He said privacy rights of people who were treated at the hospitals preclude police from obtaining from the hospitals the names, ages or other information about those who were on the deck that night and were later treated for injuries from the deck collapse.

Chase urged eyewitnesses or others who may have information about the incident to contact his office at 883-8200.

Meanwhile, the Diamond Horseshoe has reopened, with a newly constructed rear entryway stairs and landing replacing the deck entry that collapsed. It has been inspected and approved by the Polson building inspection office and the fire chief.

By John Stromnes of Montana Lee Newspapers - 08/25/2004

DECK COLLAPSE - A THIRD PERSPECTIVE

The following was the news reported in the newspaper http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/08/02/backpage/20_39_288_1_04.txt

Investigators inspect rubble of collapsed balcony; witnesses report hearing loud crack

POLSON, Mont. (AP) -- Witnesses reported hearing a loud crack before a balcony collapsed at a popular nightspot, dropping dozens of screaming people into broken glass and splintered wood.

Investigators on Sunday inspected the wreckage at the Diamond Horseshoe Casino, where at least 80 people were injured when they fell 14 feet Friday night.

Matt O'Neill, attorney for the Diamond Horseshoe, said a board attaching the balcony to the building's wall gave way.

"If you look at what happened, it has nothing to do with violating any code," he said. "It's about Montana's winter weathering the wood and the weight on the deck."

Fire Chief Tom Maloney said the balcony passed its most recent inspection, conducted as part of a routine fire inspection. He said he hoped to complete his investigation by Tuesday.

Witnesses estimated 100 to 150 people were on the 14-by-56-foot deck when it gave way, but O'Neill said he was told by club personnel that 50 to 60 people were on the deck.

Maloney said Sunday he was waiting for an engineer's report to determine the deck's occupancy load.

Tabetha Brown, 21, said she does not remember falling, but the impact was enough to knock her shoes off. Her left foot had to be fitted with a cast.

"I remember looking up at all the people standing out the door looking down at us," she said. "I remember lying there trying to figure out just what happened."

Mike Cole was standing on an adjoining deck when two of his friends disappeared into the darkness.

"Some people were trapped between boards and under other people," he said. "There were a lot of broken legs and ankles."

Maloney said the bar and casino overlooking Flathead Lake was crowded Friday because of a three-man basketball tournament in town for the weekend.