White Plains parking garage partially collapses onto cars inside
A parking garage partially collapsed in White Plains Wednesday morning.
It happened around 9:08 a.m. at 50 Hale Ave., near South Broadway. Officials said the fifth floor partially collapsed into the fourth floor.
Incredibly, no injuries were reported, but multiple cars were damaged. More than a dozen cars are in the collapse zone.
Nobody who parked in the 12-story garage can get their cars until an engineer determines the structure is safe. Police said that could happen as early as Thursday, but may also stretch into the weekend.
City officials said several roads were closed around the area.
"There was a huge sinkhole"
Video shows multiple emergency vehicles near the large parking garage. A photo shows a metal beam apparently came down, along with slabs of concrete, crushing at least three cars within the garage. There are up to 15 cars in the collapse zone, officials said.
"Over the PA system, it said 'Attention, attention, attention, come down if you're parked in the garage, we need to get the cars out,'" garage patron Siobhan Rossi said.
Rossi snapped some photos and got her car out.
"I went in the stairs and I looked to the right, and there was a huge sinkhole in the parking garage floor," Rossi said.
The garage is connected to Westchester One office tower, next to the Westchester Mall and Senesta Hotel. It's also near the White Plains Hospital.
"A lot of the hospital workers that just started park at this garage, so it's a lot of, like, newbies like me," medical assistant Rachel Meiselman said.
She now has to wait to see if her new car is totaled.
"I was asking ChatGPT what the next steps were, like, 'What if a parking garage collapses on your car? What are the next steps?' And it, like, kinda didn't know what to say," she said.
Fatima Chavez relies on her car to commute.
"I don't know how I'm getting home," she said. "I always pay the parking here every month, but I always see there's no good conditions, this building, so every car that parks, it's shaking a lot, but I never thought this is gonna happen."
As investigators try to figure out how this happened, drivers are left in limbo.
"We're blessed that it wasn't something more tragic"
"This morning, we received word of a partial collapse in this garage. The most important thing I can say at the beginning - no injuries, no fatalities," Mayor Tom Roach said.
"We're blessed that it wasn't something more tragic. If it was at 8:30 in the morning, who knows what would've happened when people were coming into work. So we're blessed that there really wasn't anybody inside the garage," White Plains Public Safety Commissioner David Chong said.
"I feel very lucky, yes. Maybe I'll go play lotto," Rossi said.
It's not yet clear what caused Wednesday's collapse.
Multiple agencies from several neighboring areas responded, including Yonkers, New Rochelle, Scarsdale and more.
"We've had a great, supportive response from Mutual Aid, so we have all types of equipment here," Roach said. "But the bottom line is that what we're working on now is shoring up the garage to make it safe to remove the vehicles that are in there. The fire department, along with multiple fire departments that are assisting us, is actually constructing columns. They put in columns initially, but they're constructing more substantial columns to ensure the safety of anyone who goes into the building."
"Units are shoring up and stabilizing the structure and that's an ongoing process," White Plains Fire Chief Claudio Petriccione said.
The garage is privately owned. CBS News New York reached out to the owner and is waiting on a response.
In 2023, a parking garage collapse in Lower Manhattan killed one person and injured several others. That collapse prompted New York City officials to implement a new inspection program, requiring owners of some 4,000 parking garages in the city to submit reports on their garage's safety. As part of that report, an engineer is required to walk through each garage and make note of conditions.
