By Maggie Cassidy, News Staff
As university officials worked with private structural engineers and the City of Boston to determine the cause of a residence hall’s cornice collapse yesterday that sent several tons of debris falling six stories onto a 100-foot stretch of Huntington Avenue, they sent a university-wide e-mail this morning alerting the community about the incident.
Nobody was injured in the collapse, according to Boston Fire Department (BFD) spokesman Steve MacDonald, who said yesterday it was an ‘absolute miracle’ nobody was walking by the building or sitting on sidewalk benches during the collapse, which made national news.
During the collapse, the cornice — a decorative stone trim bordering the roof and outer wall at 337 Huntington Ave. — dislocated from the building at about 8:30 a.m. yesterday while a roofing company was working on a multi-week project to replace the roof.
An employee who answered the phone at Haverhill-based Progressive Roofing yesterday said Progressive workers had been replacing the roof when the collapse happened. She declined to comment further, including declining today to identify whether Progressive Roofing workers were union or non-union workers.
About sixty people, including students, were evacuated from the building yesterday and relocated to Davenport B last night, according to the e-mail.Vice President of Marketing and Communications Mike Armini said they will not return to 337 Huntington Ave. this summer, and a decision has not been made about whether students will live in the building this fall.
A small number of non-student residents were also relocated outside of university housing, Armini said.
The university-wide e-mail, sent as an NU Alert at 11:46 a.m. today, described yesterday’s collapse and said it ‘appears that the circumstances surrounding the incident are isolated to this building.’
‘We routinely evaluate our facilities and perform necessary maintenance. We take great pride and care in our work to maintain a safe Northeastern campus,’ according to today’s NU Alert, which followed an e-mail sent yesterday only to full-time faculty and staff. Armini provided the e-mail to The News.
Parents of incoming students said they were happy the university notified them of the incident during yesterday’s orientation meetings, but said that if their children were already attending the school, they would have liked an alert e-mail sooner.
‘If my student was in that building, I absolutely would have wanted one and I would have been very angry if I hadn’t received one. And frankly, having a student here, knowing that it happened in one of the halls here, I would have wanted to know that it did or didn’t affect my son,’ said Mark Abramowitz, who traveled from southern California for his son’s orientation this week.
‘I suspect that they’re going to get some very angry e-mails on that, particularly since it was on CNN last night,’ he said. ‘The whole country has seen this, so I’m sure there are some worried parents out there. It sounds like a shortcoming in the protocols for their notification system.’
Armini said yesterday’s e-mail to full-time faculty and staff was ‘more of an alert to the people that we knew were on campus,’ whereas the university’s ‘primary goal,’ he said, was focusing on the 60 students living at 337 Huntington Ave.
‘Today because we got a sense of the scope of this issue and we had heard from students and families all over, we decided it was a good idea to update them as well, even if the majority of students are not in the area right now,’ he said.
‘I think that was the right decision. Today we decided to broaden it,’ he said. ‘Sometimes we send out alerts to the broader community and we get criticized for over-communicating.’
Traffic was blocked off from the Museum of Fine Arts to Massachusetts Avenue following the collapse yesterday. The westbound lane of Huntington Avenue was closed from Gainsborough Street to Forsyth Street today, forcing police to direct traffic going both ways on the eastbound lane.
Standing on Krentzman Quad yesterday, with Huntington Avenue’s westbound lane closed for two blocks and police directing traffic both ways on its eastbound lane, Abramowitz’s wife, Penny, said the collapse had made her nervous.
‘Definitely the first thing I thought about was, is Northeastern safe? The roof is coming down,’ she said. ‘But it happens.’
Other parents of incoming students, like Mark and Elisia Saab, echoed Mark Abramowitz’s concerns about emergency notification protocol. Saab said he and his family had walked by 337 Huntington Ave. an hour before the collapse.
‘I think it would have been a good idea [to send an NU Alert yesterday], because if we weren’t here, and she was here, we’d want to know about it,’ said Mark Saab.
‘It would be a concern to see it on TV and not be notified,’ Elisia Saab said.
For more coverage of the cornice collapse at 337 Huntington Ave., visit our Flickr account at www.flickr.com/photos/40385818@N07/sets/72157621266436319, and pick up our print edition, published Wednesday and available throughout campus.
