Emergency crews responded to a partial roof collapse at a drywall warehouse in Vancouver’s St. Johns area Monday morning.
The Vancouver Fire Department was called to Knez Building Material Company, 7008 N.E. St. Johns Road, just after 11 a.m. for the incident.
Employees inside the business said the snow load likely caused the collapse.
Sprinkler pipes were struck and water was gushing out of the building, but the valve to shut off the water is inside the building, which was unstable at the time, firefighter and spokesman Joe Spatz said.
No one was trapped inside the building or injured, Spatz said.
Joe Sweeney, a 26-year-old stocker at the company, was in a tractor-trailer parked inside the warehouse building when he saw a support beam begin to bend.
“It looked like a tree snapping,” he said. “I yelled for my forklift driver. He’s about to be a dad … he had nowhere to go. He was right next to that pole … then I went under the semi.”
Once the thunderous noise stopped, Sweeney said, he came out from underneath the rig and ran outside the building. He was happy to learn no one was hurt.
Spatz said firefighters cordoned off the area until water crews arrived an hour and a half later to shut off the water.
Clark County Fire Marshal Jon Dunaway said it seems likely a combination of factors led to the collapse, which took down roughly half of the building’s roof.
He said he learned that forklifts had bumped into support columns at the building several times over the years, and it might have happened again Monday.
That, combined with the snow on the building’s roof, proved to be too much.
“Today was the day it decided it wasn’t going to hold it anymore,” Dunaway said Monday.
The business will have to hire a structural engineer to conduct a thorough review, he said, and then it should be more clear what happened.
