Damage to the side of the Greenbrier condominium. City officials believe the ledger board was not properly fastened to the building.

>

City of Warwick Building Dept /

WARWICK — Judy Gendron and her four friends had just sat down to eat on the small deck on the side of her condominium here last Saturday night when they heard a loud cracking noise. Seconds later, they were falling to the ground, with a second deck overhead crashing down and pinning them in the rubble.

The five women, from their mid 30s to early 70s, suffered injuries ranging from a broken hip to a broken foot and ribs and facial injuries, according to their lawyer. Warwick firefighters had to use an air bag to lift some of the structure and chain saws to cut away the rest.

Afterward, the ledger board — the heavy plank that connected the deck to the condo — attracted the attention of city building inspectors.

You could clearly see about 12 nails, still fairly straight, and three shiny lag bolts, which are large screws. And you could see they had all been fastened on top of the building’s shingles. All three features suggest why the deck fell so dramatically.

Around the country, hundreds of people are injured by failing decks and the little secret that is well known to building experts, but not the public, is that in almost every case the decks collapse because inadequate fastening allows them to pull away from buildings.

What’s worse, the failures almost always happen in the summer, when families are celebrating out on their decks, creating the loads that rip them down.

“I would make a strong suggestion that anyone with a deck should determine how it is connected to the house,” says Robert Falk, a federal forest products scientist who has spent 15 years studying and writing about deck failures. “If you don’t see lag bolts, I wouldn’t use it. There’s been a lot of people killed on decks and it’s usually that connection.”

City inspectors suspect that the ledger boards of the Greenbrier Condominium decks were originally nailed into place. At some later date, it appears, a few lag bolts were added, but the number was inadequate.

Building codes across the country require that decks be fastened to houses with heavy steel bolts and washers at regular intervals. At a minimum, heavy lag screws should be used. Nails are prohibited. They allow decks to be pulled away as easily as someone with a hammer pulls a nail out of wood.

Warwick last weekend became another statistic of deck failures around the country.

Last Sunday, three people were injured in Everett, Wash., when their deck separated from the house and fell to the ground. About 30 people were taking part in a graduation party in Evesham, Pa., when the deck they were on broke free of the house and fell down. Two people were hurt.

The next day, two building inspectors from other communities wrote to an International Code Council online bulletin board asking for something to be done. One wrote: “Three deck collapses in one weekend. It’s time . . . to adopt comprehensive deck design provisions to help prevent problems with new decks in the next couple decades.”

Deck failures have occurred before in Rhode Island.

Three people were injured in Pawtucket’s Fairlawn section in 2004 when a deck collapsed while a family was singing happy birthday to their 11-year-old son. Once again, the builder used nails, rather than bolts, to attach the deck to the house.

The boy’s grandfather suffered a bruised arm and needed 20 stitches in his mouth. His mother broke her leg in two places and needed 15 stitches.

The Pawtucket building official later inspected other decks in the neighborhood and said some were so poorly built, they too were unsafe.

Two University of Rhode Island freshmen suffered broken bones in 2003 when a deck detached from a house in Narragansett under the weight of 20 to 30 students. The town building inspector said the deck was attached to the house with nails and said he was surprised such collapses didn’t happen more often.

A half-dozen people were injured in another deck failure in Narragansett in 1997. Once again, the inspector said it was not properly fastened to the house — the builder used nails instead of bolts or lag screws.

There is no way of knowing how many other deck collapses have occurred, because no governmental entity keeps track of such statistics.

But a recent study done by a company that makes hardware to strengthen decks found that between 2000 and 2006, 33 people were killed and 1,122 were injured in 179 deck collapses across the country.

The worst, no doubt, was in Chicago in 2003, when 12 young people were killed and 57 injured when decks collapsed during a party.

Some 800,000 new decks were built in 2005 alone, so the problem is not going to go away, according to the study by Michael Morse, who founded DeckLok Bracket Systems to make decks safer.

At the same time, Morse found the number of decks collapsing is increasing at a rate of 21 percent each year, with most collapses, by far, occurring in the summer, when decks are heavily used.

The most common cause, cited in more than 90 percent of all collapses, is failure of the ledger board connection to the house.

Generations ago, houses in New England were built with porches in front or back. They had roofs and the structures were cloaked in protective shingles.

In the 1970s and ’80s, as people migrated to suburbs such as Warwick, enclosed porches were replaced with decks, often made with pretreated lumber, but otherwise left exposed to the weather.

“Decks deteriorate,” says Warren Ducharme, an architect with the state Building Commission. “Companies say the wood is rated for 40 years, but give it 20.”

As an architect in private business earlier in his career, Ducharme said he designed many of the condos and houses in Cranston and Warwick, and decks were popular. But many people didn’t maintain them. Or they misuse them — sometimes putting kiddie pools on decks not designed to support such weight.

Another common problem, he found, was people building their own decks. Most people hammering a ledger board to a house might think it looks as secure as necessary. They would probably be unaware of the difference between vertical sheer — the force pushing down on a deck — and lateral pull — the forces pulling it away from a house.

At the Greenbrier condominiums last week, landscapers cut well tended lawns. Baskets of geraniums, shrubs and small trees framed each building.

But railings on landings were loose, stairs were crooked and support posts for some decks were bowed or cracked.

F.B. “Ted” Sarno, Warwick’s director of building administration, said a preliminary inspection by building inspector John Pagliaro found several problems: A 4-inch post supporting the fallen deck appeared to have been placed on a concrete block, rather than the required footing set 42 inches into the ground. The ledger board fixing the deck to the condo was nailed over siding, and the three lag bolts in the board are so shiny they appear to have been added later, without being reviewed by the city.

Sarno says the city suspects one of the lower support posts shifted and that pulled the decks away from the building and allowed them to crash down.

He says several other condo complexes in Warwick were pro-active in recent years and hired engineers who checked their decks for safety and design replacements where necessary.

Raymond Harrison, a lawyer representing the condo association, says maintenance wasn’t the issue, the decks clearly never complied with any building code. He faults the state for not requiring contractors to prove their competence and the builder for not providing good workmanship. “These women shouldn’t have had to have this happen — this to me is an outrage.”

James Peskin, who built the complex in the late 1980s, said he feels bad about the women being injured, but he lives in Florida now, and it’s been 23 years since the complex was finished.

“If it was two years after construction, that would be one thing, but 23 years . . .” he said.

Gendron, the condo association president, declined comment.

The Greenbrier Association, at the city’s request, is negotiating with an engineer to survey the decks throughout the complex. Until that is completed, city officials are advising the condo residents to stay off their decks. The city is not looking to punish anyone, Sarno said. It just wants to make sure no one else is hurt by a falling deck.

plord@projo.com