Engineer Inspects Hunters Ridge Apartment Complex

An engineer was at the Hunters Ridge Apartments Monday afternoon, surveying the damage after a third-floor apartment collapsed during a party Friday night. .

Joel Gillespie, who lives in the Hunters Ridge Apartment complex, was home Friday night when the apartment across the street collapsed.

"It was just chaos everywhere. People were coming out, a few on stretchers, just people limping across the parking lot and it was just speechless, you don't know what to say about it," says Gillespie.

He says it didn't seem real.

"The debris inside the apartment was so thick that the firefighters, when they walked in the door, they had to step up on it because it was waist high, and then they had to duck to get under the doorway," says Gillespie.

Mark Byerly is the consulting engineer called to the apartments Monday. He says overloading still seems to be the obvious cause, and the fact that those at the party were jumping to music only made it worse.

"Standing on a floor is one thing, jumping up and down just increases the load," says Byerly.

He says officials are now working to get the electricians in so the other tenants in the complex can come home. He adds they hope the affected apartments aren't a total loss.

"We're still investigating and that's what it's looking at this point that we'll at least have to redo the floors, we're hoping we don't have demolish the whole building," says Byerly.

Gillespie says, after witnessing this, he's just thankful for where he has.

"Can't imagine falling two flights of stairs onto debris and having just bodies lying around you. It's just unbelievable to think about that," says Gillespie.

Byerly says the building is secure so people in the affected units are allowed back in to retrieve their belongings, as long as they're with a supervisor.

He says he's investigated several of these incidents where the floor just sags and doesn't completely fall through. So the fact that this went through two floors indicates there were a lot of people at the party that night.