ELMWOOD PARK, Ill. — According to the Chicago Tribune, a building in Elmwood Park, Illinois, may have to come down after an SUV smashed through the back door of Sudz-Sational Hand Car Wash, one of the companies housed there, on Mar. 14th.
The driver escaped the vehicle without any life-threatening injuries, the article continued.
The building has a truss roof, and according to Fire Chief Kevin Miller, “If you break one component of a truss roof, the whole truss roof can cave in. We have a structural problem here that we’re assessing and trying to solve.”
Ismael Martinez, one of the carwash attendants on duty at the time, said he opened the door of the carwash for a female driver to enter, and the car continued to drive, without slowing, through the facility, going straight until she crashed her way through the overhead garage door at the back that leads into an alley.
Miller ordered all the businesses in the building to evacuate, the article noted.
In addition to the carwash, the other businesses included an Enterprise Rent-A-Car and All Cars Auto Services, an auto body shop, the article stated.
Police arrived on the scene to direct busy traffic away from the curb lane, and fire crews activated the mutual box aid alarm system to call for a technical rescue team, which is trained to respond to emergency incidents like trench and building collapses, to come and assess the damage, the article stated.
Village President Angelo “Skip” Saviano had been at Sudz-Sational just a half hour before the crash to get his car washed; he pointed out the damage to the beams and the bowed aspect of the building, adding, “The impact was so hard, it actually cracked the walls of this building. So we are going to have to be careful when we tear it down, so we don’t take the other building down.”
Read the original story here.
