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Berkeley Balcony Collapse Kills 6, Including Irish Tourists Balcony Collapse in Berkeley Kills 6 Irish Students
(about 4 hours later)
BERKELEY, Calif. — At least six people were killed and seven were seriously injured when a balcony collapsed early Tuesday at an apartment building here. Many or all of the victims were young Irish tourists. BERKELEY, Calif. — They come by the thousands — Irish students on work visas, many flocking to the West Coast to work in summer jobs by day and to enjoy the often raucous life in a college town at night. It was, for many, a rite of passage, one last summer to enjoy travel abroad before beginning a career.
Officer Byron White of the Berkeley Police said 13 people were on the fourth-floor balcony when it collapsed about 12:40 a.m., sending debris and bodies plunging to the street. Less than an hour earlier, the police had received a call of a loud party, Officer White said. He said he had no other information about that incident. But the work-visa program that allowed for the exchanges has in recent years become a source of aspiration as well as a source of embarrassment for Ireland, marked by a series of high-profile episodes involving drunken partying and the trashing of apartments in places like San Francisco and Santa Barbara.
Though the police could not confirm the victims’ ages or nationalities, a spokeswoman for the Irish Embassy in Washington, Siobhan Miley, confirmed that five of the six dead had been Irish citizens. The sixth held dual Irish-American citizenship, and Ms. Miley said she believed many of the injured were also Irish. Early Tuesday, 13 people, most of them young Irish students here on the visa program, were crowded onto a fourth-floor balcony off Unit 405 for what neighbors described as a loud party when the balcony collapsed, sending people tumbling onto the street below.
She said the victims were believed to be college-age adults spending the summer in the United States on work visas. Thousands of Irish students travel to America each year on the visas often arriving in June and leaving in September. The San Francisco area is among the most popular destinations. Six people were killed; five were Irish and the sixth had dual Irish-American citizenship, according to the Irish Embassy. Three of the dead were men, three were women, and all were in their 20s. At least seven others suffered injuries, some serious.
The Irish ambassador, Anne Anderson, said: “It is heartbreaking to think of these bright young lives cut short. All our thoughts are with the bereft families, and with those seriously injured and their loved ones.” “We thought it was an earthquake, a really big earthquake,” said Silvia Biswas, 39, who lives a floor below the balcony that collapsed in the Library Gardens Apartments, just a few blocks off a main street here. She had not been able to sleep because of the revelry, she said. “It was kind of like the building was falling down.”
Officer Jennifer Coats of the Berkeley Police Department told The Associated Press that many of the injured had life-threatening wounds. The tragedy reverberated from the streets of this college town — where two young Irish people wandered over to the police barricade to say a prayer and cross themselves — to Ireland, where officials were once again confronting the darker side of a program that is so important to the public spirit there.
Six people had died in the collapse at the Library Gardens Apartments as of Tuesday morning, said Deputy Damon Wilson of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which handles coroner duties. Deputy Wilson did not have names or ages available for the dead. “It is truly terrible to have such a serious and sad incident take place at the beginning of a summer of adventure and opportunity for so many young people,” Enda Kenny, the prime minister, said in an address to the Irish Parliament.
Officer Coats said that the police were still investigating and that she did not have any information on what the people were doing on the balcony when it collapsed. Philip Grant, the Irish consul general for the western United States, said: “To have this happen at the start of this season has left us frozen in grief. Ireland is a small country. Very few of us have been left untouched.”
“We don’t know what happened,” Officer Coats told the NBC News television station in the Bay Area, adding that officers at the scene were speaking with witnesses. “We don’t have a lot of specific detail at this point because they are still trying to work through it all.” He said the first relatives of the dead students were expected to begin arriving here from Ireland later on Tuesday.
One Library Gardens resident, Silvia Biswas, 39, said she lived on the third floor, one floor below the balcony that collapsed. She described the apartment building as a mix of working adults with families and college-age people who tend to move in and out quickly. More than 150,000 Irish students have used the program for J-1 visas to visit the United States in the past 50 years, including 8,000 last summer, officials said. They account for a large part of the students from around the world who avail themselves of a program that allows nonimmigrants to spend a summer here.
On Monday night, Ms. Biswas said, an especially raucous party could be heard on the balcony above. At one point, she said, it sounded as if fireworks were being shot off. A spokeswoman for the Irish Embassy in Washington, Siobhan Miley, said the students often arrive in June and leave in September, with the San Francisco area among the most popular destinations.
“When the balcony was falling down,” Ms. Biswas said, “we thought it was an earthquake, and a really big earthquake. It was shaking my window. It was kind of like the building was falling down.” In Dublin, students who had participated recalled the program as a high point in their lives. “There was a real sense of freedom about it,” said Shane Daly, 23, who spent the summer of 2012 in Chicago, working at odd jobs in bars, after obtaining his legal degree from Trinity College in Dublin. “It was certainly a rite of passage because it was the first time I really had to do everything for myself.”
Ms. Biswas said she yelled out the window, first looking up, then down when she saw that people had fallen to the street. When she dialed 911, she was told help was already on the way. Fiona McGoran can still recall the sense of freedom she felt when she landed in New York in 1994. “There was six of us in a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village,” Ms. McGoran said. “It was the best summer of my life — I dreamed of it for a year afterward.”
Gerald Robinson, a massage therapist living in Berkeley, was on his way home from the movies when he saw numerous fire trucks and ambulances drive by, he said. Then a group of people flagged him down to take them to Highland Hospital to see friends. One girl was bloodied and another girl had an injured leg. Everyone had Irish accents. Ciara Griffin, 24, came here in 2011, working in San Francisco but staying here because rent was so much less. “We’re all still talking about the good times we had there,” she said.
After arriving at the hospital, Mr. Robinson said he saw “15 people, some with blood on them, some without shoes on, worried about their friends.” “I am absolutely distraught for those people caught up in that tragedy over there,” she said. “This was supposed to be a trip of a lifetime, but suddenly something like this happens and it becomes an absolute nightmare.”
The collapse occurred near the University of California campus here, but it was not clear whether those injured were students. Young Irish people, many of them on work visas, frequent the Bay Area this time of year. “Every summer as long as I can remember, a large group of people come from Ireland to visit,” Officer White said. The program has also been a source of embarrassment. James Howard, 24, who went to San Diego in 2011, said it was basically “party central.”
“There were 18 of us sharing a two-bedroom apartment, and the hundreds of Irish students around us were in a similar situation,” Mr. Howard said.
“It was my first time away on my own for any length of time. I’m glad I did it, but once was enough,” he said.
Cahir O’Doherty, the arts and culture editor of The Irish Voice, wrote a column in 2014 expressing distress at “the callous destruction unleashed by these loaded Irish students” of a house rented in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
“If you know the city you’ll know Sunset is one of the more desirable locations in which to buy a home,” he wrote. “So those J-1 students actually caught a big break by being rented to in the first place. Nice payback, guys.”
“They ripped chandeliers from the ceilings, they broke doors and they smashed windows; they even punched holes in the walls,” he wrote. “Then they abandoned the place without a heads-up or a word of apology.”
The Santa Barbara/Isla Vista Facebook page set up by the Irish students offers a flavor of the work-hard, party-hard lifestyle. Call-outs for car-pooling and accommodations are interspersed with requests for house party sites. Some bars home in on the feel-good, free-spending atmosphere, offering special promotions to the Irish students.
The balcony that collapsed on the four-story building here looks out over Kittredge Street; it fell onto the balcony below. The pale yellow building fills half a block. The double-doors leading to the balcony were closed, and a warning sign pasted on the window could be seen from the street.
City building inspectors blocked access to three balconies on the building on Tuesday, pending further investigation. City officials said the owners of the building had been ordered to remove remnants of the collapsed balcony and perform a structural assessment of the remaining balconies within 48 hours.
In a statement. Lindsay Andrews, a spokeswoman for Greystar, the property management company, said the company would work with an “independent structural engineer and local authorities to determine the cause of the accident.”
Residents here said that apartments were often crammed with students trying to hold down living costs, and that people typically went out to the balcony to smoke.
The police said they received a noise complaint from the building just past midnight, one of about six that came in from various locations around that time. A few minutes later, the police received a string of reports of gunshots fired in South Berkeley, which superseded attending to the noise complaints.
Officer Byron White of the Berkeley police said 13 people were on the balcony when it gave way about 12:40 a.m., sending debris and bodies plunging to the street.
Ms. Biswas said it sounded earlier in the evening as if the celebrators were shooting off fireworks. After the collapse, she said, she looked out the window and saw people sprawled on the street, and dialed 911.
Gerald Robinson, a massage therapist living in Berkeley, said he was on his way home from the movies when a group of people flagged him down for a ride to Highland Hospital, where some of their friends had been taken. One girl was bloodied, and another girl had an injured leg.
The collapse occurred near the University of California campus here. “Every summer as long as I can remember, a large group of people come from Ireland to visit,” Officer White said.
Laura Harmon, president of the Union of Students in Ireland, described the event as a “terrible tragedy.”Laura Harmon, president of the Union of Students in Ireland, described the event as a “terrible tragedy.”
“The scale of it is unprecedented,” she said in an interview, “and it has certainly sent shock waves around the Irish student community, where it can only be regarded as a catastrophic loss.” Ms. Harmon said destinations on the West Coast had become more popular in recent years even though it was more expensive to get there than to such more traditional favorites as New York, Boston and Chicago. “The scale of it is unprecedented,” she said.
Officer White said the apartment had been full of people not just from Ireland but also from elsewhere. The inquiry into the collapse was not yet being treated as a criminal investigation, he said.
Four people died at the scene of the collapse, and one more was pronounced dead at Highland Hospital, the authorities said. Carolyn Kemp, a spokeswoman for Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley, said four people had been taken from the scene to that facility. She had no further information on their conditions.
At the apartment in Berkeley, in a busy stretch of the city’s downtown, television news trucks filled the block Tuesday morning. The double doors leading to the fallen balcony were shut, with a large warning sticker affixed to them.