They Could Have Been Saved

"That mall should be demolished.  It should be replaced with maybe some kind of a park, for people to walk to, maybe with a couple of nice statutes with Dolores' name and Lucie's name on it.  Based on what I saw,they could have been saved." Gary Gendron

Mr. Gendron was as closely affected by the outcome of the Elliot Lake mall collapse as anyone might be.  His future has certainly been altered beyond recognition.  His near future was to have been married to one of the two women killed when the roof of the mall collapsed onto the shopping centre below.  He echoes the frustration and bitterness of many of the residents of Elliot Lake, most of whom saw a disaster in the making.

Now, the announcement by Eastwood Mall Inc. and Robert Nazarian, owner of the mall, planning to reconstruct it entirely.  Their decision to rebuild the 200,000-square-foot shopping centre will be dependent on the engineers' report on the condition of what is left of the building.  "One day, this mall will be up again.  In what form, in what shape, in what format, I don't know", said the owner's lawyer.

Lawyer Antoine-Rene Fabris also acknowledged that the owners had received notice of a class-action lawsuit.  Hardly surprising, that.  And it has been revealed, as well, that engineers who had examined the state of the building's integrity had warned that it was in a parlous state.  That if nothing were to be done to dramatically ameliorate the situation a catastrophe was certain to ensue.  And it did.

Causing the death of 37-year-old Lucie Aylwin, and 70-year-old Dolores Perizzolo, killed when a section of the roof crashed through two floors.  Mr. Gendron is now in mourning for his fiancee, Lucie Aylwin.  His future will proceed as it will, but without her.  He speaks of buckets placed around the mall to catch water "raining from the ceiling". 

"There was nothing safe there at all.  I think, myself, that mall should have been closed a long time ago", he says, mournfully.  "We all had bets when this mall was going to go down, and we were hoping it would be at night time so no one would get hurt", said one resident of the community of 12,000 people.  For whom the mall represented a social and economic meeting place.

Despite which, concerns had grown to the point that the state of the building and the potential of collapse worried everyone.  One woman expressed her opinion that "no one of Elliot Lake would have let anyone they knew enter the mall, putting their lives at risk."  Yet, 300 to 400 people worked at that mall.  As a gauge of importance to the community, that's a fairly good yardstick.

The lawyer for the owners, a resident of Elliot Lake himself, along with his family, said the owners have offered their sympathies to the victims.  They are speaking with their insurers with respect to benefits for mall employees and shop owners.  It was, evidently, received wisdom that friction from the upper story parking lot was responsible for the leaky roof.

And that, revealingly enough, the owners had been planning for two years to relocate the parking lot to nearby land.  Now wouldn't that have been a timely solution to ongoing plagues in that building?  To have taken the initiative to simply close down the upper story to use as a parking lot.  To proceed with preparing parking at ground level adjacent the mall.

A simple enough solution, and one obviously badly needed.  Yet the owners spent $1-million on repairs to the roof and continued to use that upper story for parking, even though the rumble of cars parking above was felt and heard throughout the lower stories of the building.  An ominous and cautionary warning, surely?