Vacant building on Main Street demolished due to safety concerns: VFS

Al Gregory, acting assistant chief with Vancouver Fire Rescue Services, says a vacant residential building in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood has been demolished due to safety concerns.

The building, between National Avenue and Prior Street on Main Street, began to collapse Friday evening and led to a closure of Main Street’s northbound lanes while an inspection took place.

“There was a facade that had partially collapsed onto the sidewalk and spilled out onto the road,” said Vancouver Fire Rescue battalion chief Randy Boruck. “The building was obviously vacant for some time due to the dilapidated condition of it. So there were no occupants in there at the time.”

Gregory says following the inspection, city crews were called in to demolish the building Friday night.

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The demolition took city crews about three to four hours Friday night, and one fire crew was on scene to help manage dust, he said.

Main Street has since fully reopened and there are no traffic restrictions at this time related to the building collapse.

Gregory says while the take-down is complete, clean-up of the site will continue over the next day or two.

He says while fire crews don’t know the exact reason the building began to crumble, he thinks it was an inherently structural issue.

“People were noticing some issues with bricks coming off of the building and called it in,” Gregory said. “Crews investigated further and determined there were some serious structural issues and that’s when the building inspector and engineers assessed the condition of the building and determined it needed to be brought down.”