On Tuesday morning, Esquimalt Fire Department was called to a construction site at 666 Admirals Road due to reports of a cave-in.
The site had been excavated around 30 feet deep and the excavation company working there had implemented shoring, which is used to keep the walls of an open pit from collapsing.
“They’ve been working on it for about a month excavating it,” said Esquimalt Fire Chief Steven Serbic. “This morning, one of the walls of shoring collapsed, it failed.”
“Most of the fire department here has structural collapse training and we made a determination that the [adjacent] buildings needed to be evacuated immediately.”
Engineers from the Township of Esquimalt responded as quickly as they could to assess the damage and the threat to the safety of surrounding buildings’ occupants.
Two buildings at 656 Admirals Road and Constance Ave were both evacuated, but since then the residents of the Constance Avenue building have been permitted to re-enter their homes.
“Engineers are on site working with WorkSafe[BC] and they’re working on a plan on how to move forward,” Chief Serbic told Victoria Buzz.
“There was a drop of about 20 feet of earth right next to the building which kind of took out their roadway a little bit, and there’s still one car they can’t move off but that’s a significant amount of dirt.”
Chief Serbic says that although he has seen similar situations earlier in his career in Surrey, he has never seen this happen in Esquimalt. He believes it’s due to the earth not being native, but rather man-made during construction decades ago.
The Township of Esquimalt will be making an announcement in the coming days as to what will be done and when residents of 656 Admirals Road can return to their homes.
No roads were closed during Esquimalt Fire Department’s response and no construction workers or residents were injured in the incident.
“Residents were moved calmly and efficiently and it was a really really good exercise for us as a fire department,” Serbic said.
“The way it went down, it probably couldn’t have gone any better to be honest.”
