Lower Floor of Wenatchee City Hall Building Collapses
The Wenatchee Valley Fire Department usually uses water to keep fire from damaging property, but Monday morning they were called to fight water that was causing damage at the City Hall building in Wenatchee.
Crews were dispatched to the multi-story structure in the 300 block of Yakima Street at around 6:45, where spokesperson Kay McKellar says they discovered extensive damage.
"No one was in the building when they arrived but an entire floor of the building had collapsed."
Wenatchee Mayor Frank Kuntz says the collapse was caused by water that had gushed from a frozen pipe.
"In one of the overhangs of the building, a water pipe attached to the fire sprinkler system had broken. It dumped quite a bit of water by the fountain area on the lower basement level. By the time we got there just after 7:00 there was already a couple feet of water down there."
It took about 90 minutes for a majority of the water to be pumped from the basement level and courtyard area of the building, but Kuntz says the rupture did not cause widespread damage to the building.
"There was some damage to the basement level where the federal government and Local Tel leases some space but there was no damage at all to anything the city has remodeled or any of the building's top floors."
Kuntz says he doesn't have an estimate for the amount of monetary damage that was caused but that the pertinent insurance officials have been notified to assess what happened.
City Hall remains open to the public for all regular business activity and Kuntz says the occurrence will not cause an interruption to any services.