Little is known about a young construction worker who died Tuesday after a north Toronto home undergoing renovations collapsed, killing the teenaged man and injuring two others.
The 19-year-old, who has yet to be identified, worked for Euro Group Limited, a general contracting and construction management company, an employee confirmed Wednesday. The Ministry of Labour said the company, based in Oakville, was in charge of construction at the two-storey house on Brookdale Ave. and employed the workers on site.
According to the company's website, Euro Group launched in 1994 and specializes in new construction and renovations in the residential, commercial, industrial and institutional fields.
The red-brick house collapsed around 2 p.m. Tuesday. Bruce Hawkins, spokesman for city planning, confirmed that no inspection had taken place prior to the collapse.
"Inspections by Toronto Building are conducted upon request of the builder, who is required to book inspections at certain stages of work. This permit was issued on August 12, 2014, and an inspection appointment had not yet been booked," Hawkins said in an email to the Torstar News Service.
Four workers and a fifth unidentified person were working on the residential home at the time of the collapse. One worker who was outside of the home sustained minor injuries.
The only non-worker involved was trapped in the basement of the home, his legs pinned down by a beam. Firefighters used airbags and jacks to lift the wreckage before the man was removed and transferred to Sunnybrook hospital.
It took heavy equipment to recover the body of the young man killed in the incident, who was pronounced dead just after 9 p.m. A post-mortem examination of the 19-year-old was conducted by the Office of the Chief Coroner on Wednesday. Control of the scene remained in the hands of the coroner yesterday, but Ministry of Labour spokesman Bruce Skeaff said they are working with City of Toronto personnel on the ongoing investigation.
The house was undergoing a type of basement renovation called "underpinning" that has caused other downtown houses to tumble down in recent years.
Although the exact cause of 245 Brookdale Ave.'s collapse remains unknown, city building permits show that contractors were performing the "underpinning of existing basement foundations" at the time.
The term may be familiar to homeowners, especially in Little Italy and the Junction — neighbourhoods that were the site of underpinning-related housing collapses in April of this year and 2012 respectively.
While it's common, and normally safe, underpinning can be risky in certain soil conditions and is subject to serious human error, contractors say.
The procedure is often undertaken to increase headroom in a basement by lowering the house's foundation. It involves excavating the existing foundation in stages — usually three — so that the majority of the house is never totally unsupported.
The process grows more perilous in sandy soil, said John Ischiropoulos, owner of the Toronto-based Maximum General Contracting Inc.
"Some areas in the city, we've seen — like the Keele and Bloor Sts. area — is very sandy, almost hour-glass sand," he said. In those conditions, Ischiropoulos underpins basements in five stages, rather than three.
In 2012, a house on Maria St., near Runnymede Rd. and Dundas St. W., dramatically sank and shifted during an underpinning, forcing a demolition. City building officials attributed the problem in part to soil conditions.
But Daniel Johnston, owner of True North Underpinning Inc., said he had done projects in the vicinity of the collapsed Brookdale Ave. house, near Yonge St. and Lawrence Ave., and that the soil was silty clay and relatively firm.
A more recent basement renovation gone wrong took place on Roxton Rd. in Little Italy this April. In that case, a house partially collapsed shortly after city inspectors determined that an underpinning project was being done improperly.
And while contractors say that certain kinds of foundations, such as rubble stone, can be more prone to accidents than others, Johnston said incompetent workmanship was usually the culprit in house collapses.
"It's more human error," he said. "If you don't know what you're doing, you can make any house fall down."
Euro Group Ltd. did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Henrik Londen, who lives a few doors down from the collapsed house and was a friend of one of the workers, said he spoke to him Tuesday morning.
"He said he's enjoying the work at the site and was learning about underpinning," Londen said.
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