By Michael Stavola
The Wichita Eagle
WICHITA, Kan. — Wichita firefighters had to go buy more wood for a call they had trained for but not responded to in at least 10 years.
Jose Ocadiz , a Wichita battalion chief, said he hadn’t heard of such a call as Wednesday’s at the vacant Commodore building — where a huge chunk of bricks fell off the 1929 structure — in the 10 years he has served in an administrative position with the department and would be familiar with such calls. He has been with the department 27 years and didn’t know about a similar call during that time either.
More typical calls for the building collapse response team are to shore up homes hit by a vehicle. Those have more to do with concerns about the home losing an area that helped maintain its structure.
The bricks are just aesthetics. There were no concerns about the integrity of the building, Ocadiz said.
There were concerns about more bricks falling, possibly hurting anyone who walked by on the downtown sidewalk below, after the roughly 40x40 foot area fell.
Fire crews were called to the nine-story building just after 2 p.m. They left around 8 p.m.
Firefighters used a technique called a tieback, Ocadiz said.
Firefighters drilled holes into the concrete and put anchors into that. They also fixed 2x4 wood to the back of plywood sheets, which had been measured and had smaller cuts on each side of the 2x4.
The tiebacks, which look like heavy-duty ratchet straps, are then run around the back of the 2x4s, through the holes in the plywood and into the anchor.
“And that’s basically what the tieback is, is putting the pressure from the exterior back onto the building itself,” Ocadiz said.
Making the job even more unique is that was done on the seventh and eighth floors, he said.
“So we did have to utilize other types of rope rescue techniques to be able to hoist and be able to utilize the crews from up top, from inside the window sills, to then raising the boards for the securing of the brick from the exterior,” he said. “So this was a unique type of a shoring operation.”
They also a ladder on a firetruck to help.
What they did is supposed to be temporary, Ocadiz said, while the Metropolitan Area Building and Construction Department works with the building owner for a permanent fix. The area where the bricks fell is blocked off from foot traffic until then.
Ocadiz said firefighters who responded to the unique call have a national, 80-hour structural collapse technician certificate that they got over an eight-day course in Topeka.
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