Delaware hotel façade falls onto boardwalk
A Delaware hotel’s façade collapsed onto a Rehoboth Beach boardwalk over the holiday weekend in an incident that, amazingly, left no one injured.
City manager Sharon Lynn said the Henlopen Hotel’s loss of a 45-foot chunk on July 4 was a “cosmetic” issue, something the city didn’t want to take for granted after the devastating June 24 collapse of a 12-story condo in Surfside, Florida, WDEL News reported Wednesday.
“We had our city officials go over there and take a look at it and determine that it’s cosmetic and not structural, so that was a big relief,” said Lynn.
Though city engineers determined the eight-story building, which has been around since the 1970s, to be sound and Rehoboth already requires annual building inspections, Lynn told the outlet that the Surfside collapse has warranted “a second look” for several buildings.
“[We’re] taking a look at our code to determine whether our code needs to be stricter,” said Lynn.
City code does not currently require those inspection reports be submitted to the city, a practice which, as the city’s chief building engineer Matthew Janis, told the outlet, could be made stricter.
Sixty fatalities from the partial collapse at Champlain Towers South were confirmed Thursday, two weeks after the structural horror unfolded in the middle of the night and just a day after first responders said their mission would now be one of recovery.
