This is bad news. Two ramps of the South Avenue Parking garage collapsed yesterday.

Rochester blogger Chuck Simmins was in the garage a few minutes before it happened and has a photo on his blog, here.

The Democrat and Chronicle write-up gave a hint as to the “why’s:”

The city-owned garage opened in 1974 and has been undergoing about $6 million in repairs for more than a year.

In a February 2004 document from then-Mayor William Johnson to City Council proposing $5 million in renovations, Johnson said the garage “has surpassed its original life expectancy and is deteriorating.”

The ongoing repairs, however, “did not include the ramp, but rather areas adjacent to it,” according to City Communications Director Gary Walker.

Nobody was injured in the collapse (miraculously, considering it happened shortly after five on a weekday) but this is going to be a mess that keeps on messing things up for a long time. Not only will it create a downtown parking problem, but they’re going to have to figure out why it collapsed and whether the rest of the garage is structurally sound or not. Mayor Duffy is quoted in the D&C article as saying he’ll need “an awful lot of convincing” to reopen the garage in the future. Yeah, well I’d need an awful lot of convincing to use it in the future . . .

Oh, and btw. How is it that we have municipal buildings that only last thirty years? Is that normal for parking garages, I wonder?

Update: an engineering consulting firm, Stantec Consulting Group, had raised concerns to the city about “deteriorating conditions…”