# Building collapse at Morton Salt on North Side



## mark handler (Dec 31, 2014)

Building collapse at Morton Salt on North Side

Posted: 12/30/2014, 02:33pm | Brian Slodysko, bslodysko@suntimes.com

t started Tuesday afternoon with a loud crash.

Next thing Maurice Venton knew, a wall of the iconic Morton Salt warehouse — company motto: “When It Rains It Pours” — gave way to an avalanche of white crystal and brick.

When it was over, a cluster of cars parked outside the McGrath Acura dealership, Morton’s nearest neighbor, lay buried beneath a mountain of salt. And a massive hole stood where the center of the warehouse’s south-facing wall once stood.

Venton and a co-worker were dumbfounded.

“We were just conversating,” said Venton, a porter for the Near North Side dealership at Elston and Potomac. “Everything just pretty much imploded.”

Spilling salt crunched body paneling and even shoved a few cars out of their parking spaces. “It was a lot of force,” Venton said, likening the sight to a natural disaster seen on TV.

Some of the damaged vehicles belong to McGrath Acura, but some were customer cars parked outside the dealership’s service department, Venton said.

“Everything just pretty much imploded,” said Maurice Venton, a porter for the McGrath Acura dealership at Elston and Potomac. | Brian Slodysko/Sun-Times

“It was just amazing to see something happen like that. It was so fast,” he said.

Venton was a safe distance away and unscathed by the spill, though a sense of “total dismay” momentarily overcame him. The Chicago Fire Department said no one was injured when the wall collapsed at 2:10 p.m.

Representatives for the salt company did not respond to a voicemail left Tuesday afternoon at the warehouse.

Chicago Department of Buildings spokeswoman Mimi Simon said a preliminary investigation found that salt kept inside was piled too high, causing the wall to collapse.

Motorists and pedestrians passing by gawked at the salt drift. Some snapped pictures.

A crew of engineers showed up about 5 p.m. to assess the structural integrity of the building. City workers said no one would be allowed close to the building until the engineers gave the OK to begin removing the salt.

Tuesday’s collapse followed another structural flaw in the building. The company has an outstanding violation for failing to repair and maintain a portion of the roof, Simon said.

While Venton said the accident was no laughing matter, he did offer a droll quip that any car owner who’s made it through a Chicago winter could relate to.

“I hope they got rust coating,” Venton said. “I’ll tell you that.”







A wall collapsed at the Morton Salt building at Elston and Potomac, Tuesday afternoon. No injuries were reported, according to fire media, though some cars at the nearby Acura dealership sustained some damage. | Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times






A wall collapsed at the Morton Salt building at Elston and Potomac, Tuesday afternoon. No injuries were reported, according to fire media, though some cars at the nearby Acura dealership sustained some damage. | Michael Schmidt/Sun-Times


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## steveray (Dec 31, 2014)

"When some dummy piles the salt too high, it pours." will be their new marketing campaign....It's no Great Boston Molasses Flood, but at least no one was killed...


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## cda (Dec 31, 2014)

slight """"salt corrosion""" problem on the steel????!!!!!!

Guess they did not anticpate that one?


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## ICE (Dec 31, 2014)

cda said:
			
		

> slight """"salt corrosion""" problem on the steel????!!!!!!Guess they did not anticpate that one?


It was bad enough that the steel is gone.


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## Mech (Dec 31, 2014)

Nice to see there's a car wash right next door.


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## fatboy (Dec 31, 2014)

Bad enough the steel was never there...........


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## conarb (Dec 31, 2014)

It's all the doctors' fault, they are telling everyone to eat low salt diets creating a worldwide surplus of salt, as we have a worldwide surplus of oil we better hope that oil tanks better not break down spilling oil all over our cars, that stuff is hard to get off, salt's easy, just wash it off and salt the roads for global warming in the process.


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## Pcinspector1 (Jan 1, 2015)

"That's a salty situation!"

Pc1


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## mark handler (Jan 2, 2015)

Same Morton Salt wall collapsed 20 years ago, when it rains, it pours

CHICAGO (WLS) -- http://abc7chicago.com/news/same-morton-salt-wall-collapsed-20-years-ago/458342/

More Pictures at:

http://abc7chicago.com/news/same-morton-salt-wall-collapsed-20-years-ago/458342/

 Morton Salt is promising to work quickly and efficiently to clean up and repair its building after a wall collapsed on Tuesday, spilling tons of salt onto cars at a neighboring car dealership.

How do you begin to fix a broken wall with tons of salt below? The answer is: One brick at a time. It will take a day, maybe two, but the roof trusses on the 86-year-old salt warehouse are said to be in good shape.

Once the bowed-out section of wall is removed, and the roof made certain, the salt dig-out can begin.

"We are going to leave it to the roofing expert to make that final assessment, and then to come up with a repair plan," said Denise Lauer, Morton Salt.

The salt pile that buried 11 cars behind McGrath Acura is something of a photo attraction, but just a little bit more than that for Richard Fattore, a retired contractor.

"I had to come here today to take a look at it. My wife says, 'What are you going there for?' I say, 'I gotta see the wall I built.' Gotta see what collapsed. It was the same thing 20 years ago," Fattore said.

Yes, this happened before. Same wall, only a bigger break, according to Fattore, who was the contractor hired at the time to do what is being done again now.

"The wall was twice as big. The same problem with the salt being behind there and they built the same wall back the way it was 20 years ago," Fattore said.

What happened a couple decades ago didn't get as much attention because there was no car dealership here then, and no cars buried in salt. The city's preliminary judgment, and Fattore agrees, is that the salt was piled much too high inside for a masonry wall with now steel reinforcement.

"You gonna do anything to reinforce the wall in the future. I'm sure the general contractor and the operations team will come up with a way to insure it is a safe structure so I will defer to their expertise on how to manage that," Fattore said.


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