A balcony collapses: San Francisco, 1996

Daniel Slane was making his morning cup of tea – a habit passed down from his Donegal mother and Roscommon father during childhood summers in Ireland – when he heard it on the news.

“A balcony collapsed. Any time I hear that my ears go up,” he says. “When I heard they were Irish kids and in Berkeley, I said, ‘Oh my God.’ ” He ran in to tell his wife, Kathy.

On February 17th, 1996, when he was 35, Slane and his 32-year-old wife at the time, Mary Ellen, were at a party in an apartment on Franklin Street in the upmarket Pacific Heights area of San Francisco when the third-floor balcony at the back of the apartment collapsed.

It dropped eight people to the deck below and plunged Mary, Kathy – whose surname was Reidy at the time – and three others further to the concrete ground.

Mary was killed in the collapse – the only fatality – and 12 people were injured, four seriously. Kathy landed on her feet. The impact shattered her left heel, fractured her pelvis in three places, and broke all the metatarsal bones in her right foot.

The collapse in Berkeley brought back many memories.

“Even though it was 20 years ago the parallels for me were great,” Kathy says. “I was listening over the two weeks afterwards to hear the details of what had gone on. My jaw dropped when I heard it had to do with faulty construction. It was so similar to what happened to us and frustrating that nothing had been learned.”

Crackling noise

The similarities are striking. As with the Franklin Street collapse, dry rot was to blame for the Berkeley tragedy. The main difference was that the collapse in Berkeley in June claimed six lives, all students, five of them from Dublin. The higher number of fatalities is perhaps down to the Franklin Street balcony’s being a storey lower: a third-floor balcony as opposed to the fourth-floor one in Berkeley, about 10m up rather than 12m.

The deck at 2003 Franklin Street, an older Victorian house, was supported by posts rising from the balcony below. The posts for both balconies should have gone all the way down to the ground, but modifications to the property meant that the third-floor balcony was supported only by posts from the second-floor deck.

In both cases a party was under way. The one that Daniel, Kathy and Mary were at was a going-away party hosted by Troy Winkles, who was leaving for Atlanta. The guests were young professionals. Most worked in insurance or were friends of friends. The evening was balmy, warm enough for people to go out on the back deck, which was 4m long and 4m wide, to chat and listen to reggae. About 20 were at the party when the deck fell, just before 8.30pm.

The deck collapsed away from the wall of the building first, sending those closest to the door onto the deck below. They were not badly injured. It was worse for the others.

The five women who fell to the ground were farther out on the balcony. They were chatting about a St Valentine’s Day date that one of them, 27-year-old Shalini Malhorta, had been on three days earlier.

“The next thing I remember is the loud crackling noise of wood. And darkness. I remember the blackness and the sound the most,” Kathy says.

“I happened to have a memory of my deceased brother telling me I would land on my feet. I just remember lying on the ground and being smashed, in the sense that I couldn’t get out. I was definitely out of my head. I was in shock, and I was screaming for somebody to let me out.”

Nikki Bickell, who was 28 at the time (and called Nikki Cataleta), recalls seeing a corner of the deck bouncing up and down, before it collapsed. “I remember falling, and then everything stopped. I was conscious, so I thought, Oh, phew, it’s over,” she says. She broke her right femur and left elbow but says she was “the luckiest”.

Daniel and the others at the party ran down and helped to heave the fallen deck off the bodies of the injured beneath. He saw some of his badly injured friends first and then saw his wife, Mary.

“I told her, ‘All you have got to do is breathe for me.’ She breathed for me three times, and that was it. The coroner later said that was consistent with her lungs being filled with blood.”

It later emerged that the apartment’s landlord, Randall Nathan, had had a number of run-ins with the city over his properties, encouraging the San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, to take a criminal prosecution.

Hallinan personally prosecuted the case, the first time in more than 50 years that a sitting district attorney in the city had led a courtroom action.

After a criminal trial lasting about a month, the jury failed to reach a verdict on two counts of involuntary manslaughter, charges that carried up to four years in prison on conviction.

Nathan was found guilty of two misdemeanour charges: failure to maintain a building in a safe condition and failure to apply for a permit for remodelling work. He was ordered to do 200 hours of community service, pay a fine of $1,000 and serve two years of unsupervised probation.

A civil action for damages went to an out-of-court mediation process. More than two years after the collapse Nathan was ordered to pay $14 million to Daniel Slane and the other survivors.

The highest sum, $8.2 million, went to Malhorta, who had severe head injuries. The other injured also received payouts.

“Dry rot caused the failure of the joists,” says Niall McCarthy, a lawyer with Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy, which prosecuted the landlord on behalf of most of the injured. “After the DA failed, we went forward with the civil trial. Unquestionably there was a liability. There were no inspections by the owner. In fact the owner received some warnings.”

The collapse and aftermath brought Daniel Slane and Kathy Reidy closer. They already had a lot in common; their families were from the same Irish neighbourhood of San Francisco, the Sunset District. Her father’s parents are from Co Kerry. The couple later married and now have three daughters.

Early reports of the 1996 accident suggesting that the balcony was overloaded angered Daniel as much as the New York Times report two days after the Berkeley tragedy that implied the victims were in some way responsible because they were partying. The deck, like the Berkeley balcony, should have been able to hold many more people.

“Irresponsible journalism”

“It made us sound like we were very irresponsible. The only thing that was irresponsible was the journalism,” he says. “The problem is that it is that first impression. We went through the entire tragedy hearing people say we heard there was a lot of people on that deck. It irked us no end.”

On Wednesday President Michael D Higgins will plant a tree in Berkeley in memory of the six students killed in the June 16th collapse. He will also meet firefighters, police, paramedics and other medical staff who treated the students.

Kathy’s advice to the Berkeley survivors is not to rush back as quickly as possible. Being young then, she went back to her life as fast as she could, “to create some sense of normal”.

She still suffers pain in her feet and ankles and, after some dark moments following the collapse, visited a therapist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which she is still being treated for.

Now, at the age of 47, she finds that the injuries she suffered almost 20 years ago are manifesting themselves a little more. She kept a journal, writing down how she felt every day, that helped with her recovery.

“Try not to find normal again, because the normal is not there any more,” she says by way of advice to the Berkeley survivors. “Your normal is different now. Young people are inclined to have that sense of invincibility. I think I could have healed more than just getting back to my routine and thinking everything will be fine again.”