Ontario Construction News staff writer
An apartment building in downtown Halifax that was under construction when a crane fell on it during post-tropical storm Dorian has been renamed after the disaster that made it famous.
Seymour Trihopoylos, one of the owners of the building that was to be called The Olympus, says the building will instead be known as The Crane on South Park in recognition of the Sept. 7, 2019 collapse.
A report on the cause of the collapse is expected to be presented to the Nova Scotia government this year.
Trihopoylos says the name change makes sense because “the building will be remembered for what happened during Dorian – a post-hurricane storm.
Construction was delayed by more than a year after the crane from a construction site next door fell and damaged it.
“The best part of the whole story is that there was no loss of life, and that the crane fell on a structure that was unoccupied, so there was no death or injury,” Trihopoylos said. “It hit our building and put us behind, but money and time will fix the building, whereas if we’d lost a single life, it would have been a disaster.”
Nova Scotia has agreed to pay $2-million to clean up the collapsed crane and have the area reopened.
In October 2019, a proposed class action lawsuit was launched to recover losses sustained by businesses and tenants against developers W.M. Fares Architects Inc., and W.M. Fares and Associates Inc., Lead Structural Formwork Ltd., of Moncton, N.B. — the owner, operator and installer of the crane — and Manitowoc Company Inc., the U.S.-based designer of the crane.
Story includes content from The Canadian Press, first published March 9. (Michael Tutton, The Canadian Press)