The partial collapse of a wall of a downtown building Thursday has displaced tenants, threatened neighboring business and called on the owner and city officials to decide what to do to make the area safe again.
The Flandreau City Council has declared the building at the southeast corner of Second Avenue and Wind Street a nuisance. That means the building owner Jim Zandt of Sioux Falls has seven days to come up with a way to make sure the property is safe for the public and neighboring businesses. He told council members that he wants to repair the building.
One block of Wind Street on the west side of the building will remain closed to traffic. People may walk on the west side of the street only and can enter Fat Boys Bar through the southern door.
In the meantime, owners of the Flandreau Bakery and Fat Boys Bar have been allowed to reopen at their own risk. The businesses were shut down at 3:30 p.m. Thursday afternoon, a few hours after stone blocks on the back wall of the corner building started falling off. A large crack also is visible on the southwest side of the building.
The council, at a special meeting Friday, also issued a public admonishment that says that anyone entering the nearby businesses assume full risk of injury to themselves or their property if the building should collapse. Officials have said there is no way to know which direction the building would fall in a collapse and have brought up the collapse of the Copper Lounge in 2016 in Sioux Falls as an example of the severity of the issue. One man died and a woman was rescued from the rubble of the building at the corner of Tenth Street and Phillips Avenue.
Paul Lewis, former city attorney who was filling in for the current attorney, named some of the families who aren’t able to enter the building and said, “A lot of other people who have been grievously inconvenienced, that’s on Mr. Zandt’s head.”
Families who live in the apartments in the building asked council members if they could enter for even a few hours to get their belongings out. They are staying at the Royal River Casino for now and have none of their personal items. There are four families in the Zandt building and four over the bakery that have been displaced.
Fire Chief Jud Krull said he would not send anyone into the Zandt building because the risk is too great. He has five children and a wife to go home to and said no one should risk their life for the building.
He disapproved of a decision to send a firefighter in to rescue some birds because it put the value of a human life over the value of a pet.
Firefighters took shifts to monitor the building for nearly 24 hours after the initial blocks fell.
“My recommendation is the city takes it over and tears it down,” he said. “I’m telling you, don’t drag this out.”
The building has been inspected for at least 18 years by the fire department, and when there are issues that would have closed it down, Zandt has done enough maintenance to keep it minimally meeting city code.
Council responds
Some council members had harsh words for Zandt at the meeting.
“This has been a problem waiting to happen for quite some time,” said council member Jason Unger. When the city would try and do something about the building, Zandt would do just enough to fix it up, Unger said.
Unger said the decaying building puts its neighbors, Fat Boys and the Flandreau Bakery, in peril.
Bakery co-owner Don Duncan said not being able to work from his building would put his business at risk of closing because he wouldn’t be able to serve his wholesale customers, roughly 50 percent of his sales.
“It’s going to affect us quite a bit. It would affect whether we’ll ever open again,” he said in an interview before the meeting. “If we lose all of that it might be a good time for us to retire.”