Northwest Edmonton building in early construction stage damaged after windy evening

A building in early construction stages in northwest Edmonton was heavily damaged following a stormy Wednesday evening.

Dozens of steel beams were blown over and scattered at the site at 184 Street and 126 Avenue on Thursday morning.

Emergency crews were called early Thursday after workers started to arrive on the scene.

There have been no injuries reported.

“It looks like there’s been some equipment damaged underneath (the beams),” said district chief Glenn Roseboom.

“We can’t speculate on how it came down or what caused it, but we had a really good storm last night.”

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A severe thunderstorm hit the Edmonton and surrounding area on Wednesday evening.

Some areas outside of Edmonton were also placed under a tornado warning for part of the night.

A spokesperson for Hopewell, the building’s developer, confirmed the wind precipitated the collapse.

Security cameras on site show the building fall during Wednesday’s windstorm, they said.

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“It was really hard to believe,” construction worker Eric Button said as he taped off the area on Thursday. “I’ve never seen something like that before.”

Chris Hebert and Vibeke Bradbury work in the area and had been watching the building go up for the past week. Bradbury said crews had just started building the structure on Monday.

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She couldn’t believe the building had been levelled by the storm.

“’Did that storm really do that?’” she thought after seeing the destruction when she got to work on Thursday. “That’s a lot of work to just be gone. It blew my mind, to be honest.”

“The first thing I thought was that somebody messed up somewhere. Somebody didn’t do something right,” Hebert said. “For that to fall down…

“I used to be scaffolder and I’ve had scaffolding in wind storms like that and they don’t come down. That’s a big structure to come down.”

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An investigation is underway into the collapse.