Downtown roads shut for 1 week near partial building collapse

Commuters are taking a detour Monday around a heritage building in downtown Ottawa that partially collapsedthree days earlier. Meanwhile,municipalinspectorsare tryingto determine whetherthe buildingcan be saved.

Somerset Street West will be closed from Kent to O'Connor streets and Bank Street will be closed from Maclaren and Cooper streets until further notice, an Ottawa police news release said Monday.

An earlier release said the roads would be closed for about a week while engineers investigate the building at the corner of Bank and Somerset streets, which housed the Duke of Somerset pub.

Building inspectors from the city andand safety inspectors from the Ontario Ministry of Labourwere both at thesite Monday.

It is believed the collapse took placeafter aBobcat machine backed into a masonry column during renovations, said Peter Black, manager of building inspections for the city.

In such older buildings, single columns can carry an enormous load, he added.

"That's the way they used to build them," he said, adding that topplingcolumns can lead to a "catastrophic failure" of a structure.

The first and second floors fell down around 3 p.m. Friday asfive workers excavated in the building's basement, said an Ottawa paramedic service news release. A rear brick wall also collapsed.

The workersreceived only minor injuries. One of them, a 44-year-old man inside the cage of a Bobcat excavator he had been operating, was trapped in the rubble for more than an hourbefore he was freed by firefighters.

Firefighters were to stabilize the building and then turn it over to the Ministry of Labour, district fire chief Lyle Fraser said Friday, who said the entire building was at risk of collapse after the incident.

In May, the building's owner, Tony Shahrasebi,said that the Ministry of Labour had closed the work site on at least one occasion over safety concerns prompted by the fact that the workers were not wearing hard hats.

Several of the workers on the site Friday were wearing shirts that identified them as employees of Shahrasebi's Minute Car Wash.