‘Did not look right’: Workers flagged concerns before deadly Boise hangar collapse

(Idaho Statesman) — Several employees who worked at the site of a deadly building collapse on Boise Airport grounds told police they had noticed bending beams, snapped cables and overall structural issues, according to Boise Police Department investigative reports obtained by the Idaho Statesman.

Some of these workers informed the site’s supervisor of the concerns the day before the hangar crumbled on Jan. 31, killing three people and injuring nine others.

Interviews with employees of Boise-based Inland Crane, which provided equipment and operators for the construction of the Jackson Jet Center hangar, were documented in Boise Police Department reports that were released to the Statesman through a public records request.

The records showed that at least two employees told officers they’d expressed concerns about the steel frame to the site’s supervisor. An Inland Crane supervisor said he told a co-founder of Big D Builders that the beams “did not look right.”

Big D Builders, of Meridian, was the general contractor for the project and was assembling an engineered steel frame that would eventually become the hangar, the Statesman previously reported.

The hangar was under construction for the privately owned Jackson Jet Center when it collapsed. Three people died and nine more were injured, with five of those in critical condition right after the accident.

The Inland Crane supervisor “has worked a crane on several of these types of sites, and the ‘bowing’ of the beam did not look right to him,” police wrote in one of the reports.

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The supervisor told police that he had reported those concerns to Big D Builders co-founder Craig Durrant, one of the three victims killed in the collapse, who had made calls to an engineer.

The two other men who were killed, 32-year-old Mario Sontay Tzi and 24-year-old Mariano “Alex” Coc Och, were construction workers who had moved to Idaho from Guatemala, the Statesman previously reported.

“There were plenty of warning signs that things were not right,” Enrique Serna, an attorney representing the families, told the Statesman by phone. “They clearly knew that something was off.”

Jane Gordon, another attorney representing the families, told the Statesman by phone that she’s looking forward to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigation findings regarding the collapse.

“Once we know what happened, then we’ll be looking to hold people accountable and looking for justice for the victims,” Gordon said.

The Boise Police Department handed its information to OSHA on Feb. 2. The investigation could take up to six months, David Kearns, director of OSHA’s Boise Area Office, previously told the Statesman.

“It’s likely to be a fairly longer and complex investigation,” Kearns said. “You like to treat them all the same, but if you have a structural collapse, it takes a lot of evidence and deep diving to put the whole puzzle together.”

Big D Builders said beams were ‘bowing’

The contractors also acknowledged problems installing the steel frame. In an interview with police, Dennis Durrant, owner of Big D Builders and Craig Durrant’s brother, said that the beams were “bowing” and that they’d reached out to the manufacturer because the supports for the frame weren’t “adequate,” according to the reports.

Dennis Durrant said company officials had received some guidance from an engineer to re-enforce the building. Interviews showed the crane supervisor said Craig Durrant told him the frame was fine after speaking to the engineer, because the workers added straps on the beams and were trying to place more beams, known as purlins, to support the roof.

The Durrant brothers were standing in the center of the construction site when they heard loud popping and breaking noises, according to the police reports. Knowing something was wrong, they ran for the perimeter, but Dennis Durrant told police that the building “came down within seconds,” killing Craig Durrant.

“We have lost family members and valued employees who were close personal friends. We have also had colleagues experience significant injuries,” Big D Builders previously said in an emailed statement. “Behind our company name is a small, Idaho-grown, family-owned business, and we are grieving deeply with our community.”

The city of Boise’s Building Division didn’t have any concerns or issues with the project during a recent inspection. Since 2010, Big D Builders had more than a dozen safety violations on other projects, according to prior Statesman reporting.

Big D Builders declined to comment through a spokesperson for this story, citing the ongoing OSHA investigation.

Inland Crane employees, crane operators report issues

An Inland Crane safety officer who didn’t witness the collapse told police that several of the company’s employees had advised him there were “structural integrity concerns” for the hangar, according to the reports.

“He also confirmed multiple crane operators from Inland Crane reported curved beams and snapped stiffener cables,” police wrote in one report.

Another crane operator at the scene told police that the hangar’s overhead beams weren’t straight and that there weren’t enough cross-sections to support the overhead beams, according to the reports. That crane operator said “this was very uncommon” and alleged of “corners being cut.”

“The oversight was sh–,” he said in his interview with police.

David Stark, Big D Builders superintendent general contractor, maintained that there weren’t any problems and that he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at the site.

The cranes were at the job site to “straighten out the hangar because portions of it were bending,” another crane operator told police. By the time of the collision, only one of Inland Crane’s cranes was left at the site, after there had been four there at one time earlier in the week.

Inland Crane Vice President Jeremy Haener has previously said the cranes or crane operators weren’t responsible for the collapse.

“When the building collapsed due to an unknown structural failure, the crane boom — the hydraulic arm of the equipment — snapped on impact,” Haener said in a news release.

Haener, through a spokesperson, declined to answer a list of questions sent by the Statesman.

“Inland Crane is actively participating in the OSHA investigation around the tragic incident that occurred on a Boise job site on Jan. 31,” Haener said in an emailed statement Tuesday. “Out of respect for the integrity of that process, we have no additional statements to make until that review is completed. We continue to mourn the loss of our colleagues and friends.”