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Fishtown building collapse leaves lives in limbo

The clothes on her back, some sports memorabilia, and a few crushed toys salvaged from the dusty rubble of her Fishtown apartment are all that is left to Catherine Clancy and her son Daniel now, after the building collapse that flattened their world.

The clothes on her back, some sports memorabilia, and a few crushed toys salvaged from the dusty rubble of her Fishtown apartment are all that is left to Catherine Clancy and her son Daniel now, after the building collapse that flattened their world.

"If I had been in there, I would have been crushed," said Clancy, 70, dressed in pink Crocs, navy shorts, and a powder-blue T-shirt.

Her gray hair in a topknot, sweat freckling her brow, Clancy stood on the sidewalk yesterday and watched a wrecking crew comb through the broken bricks and twisted wires where, the day before, her rowhouse stood in the 1700 block of Frankford Avenue. The building contained six rental units.

Workers pulled out Daniel Clancy's collection of hockey and baseball cards inside plastic sleeves spattered with dirt, and formerly mint-condition collectible Transformer toys, still in their boxes, now ruined.

From the depths of the mess came Catherine Clancy's Wachovia bank card.

She prayed hardest for the recovery of a small bundle of cash - about $1,200 in old bills, she said - wrapped in a plastic bag.

Police posted a squad car at the site to discourage looters until the salvage operation can resume today.

Authorities said a contractor working on an adjacent vacant parcel on Saturday apparently undermined the foundation of Clancy's building, causing most of it to crash down.

She and Daniel, 27, were not home at the time, but other tenants were. Four of the apartments were rented.

While some neighbors raised questions about whether the unidentified contractor took the necessary precautions during excavation, at least one person working at the site credited the crew with acting swiftly to prevent the loss of life.

"They did a responsible thing when they saw that the building was going to fall," said Bill Pecarsky, head of Gama Wrecking, the company hired by the city to finish bringing the building down and make the ground safe.

"No doorbells were working in the building," Pecarsky said. "So they threw rocks at the windows to alert the tenants to get out."

Michael Curran of the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections visited the site yesterday but said he was not authorized to discuss the matter while it is under investigation. He did not name the property owner or contractor.

Pecarsky said that many of the city's 100-year-old-plus properties are built on simple stone foundations and that renovators, faced with building height restrictions, often dig the cellars deep to get more usable space. Once they get below the stone, they hit dirt.

Building regulations require contractors to shore up adjacent properties with supports during excavations, he said. It appeared that recent rains softened the soil before those supports were in place, which probably contributed to the collapse, Pecarsky said.

"That little bit of rain, washing out the dirt, dropped the building," he said.

In Philadelphia, where an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 buildings are in substandard condition, that's all it takes, and "it happens all the time," Pecarsky said.

He estimated the cost of the demolition, plus repairs to a home that shared a party wall with Catherine Clancy's building, would exceed $60,000. The cost will be borne by the owner of the parcel where the excavation was taking place, the contractor, and their insurance companies.

Catherine Clancy said she fainted when she came home to find her apartment toppled. The gash she got when she hit her forehead was still raw yesterday, as was her disorientation.

Supported by her daughter Melissa Clancy, a US Airways ramp agent who lives around the corner, the pair pondered the older woman's next moves.

"I moved here in 1997. I hate moving," said Catherine Clancy, who occupied the ground-floor apartment and says she does not know where she will go now.

"They could have been crushed and never known what hit them," Melissa Clancy said. "Three floors would have fallen on them. I can't get my emotions straight. I don't know whether to be happy they're alive, or angry about all they lost."

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