The night after Christmas wasn’t exactly a silent one along East Webb Avenue, where a commercial storage building collapsed after dusk on the evening of December 26.
According to Burlington’s fire department, this “large storage barn,” which the Alamance Lumber Company owns at 840 East Webb Avenue, had partially caved in overnight and remained structural unstable. Part of the building reportedly fell into the sidewalk along Flanner Street, which had to be cordoned off while work crews removed the building’s electrical utilities.
Matt Lawrence, a deputy chief with the city’s fire department, said that, other than “age and deterioration,” his agency has been unable to identify any possible cause for the storage building’s collapse. Lawrence added that this particular building wasn’t compromised by a vehicular crash that had damaged another one of the company’s structures a few weeks ago. “I do know,” Lawrence went on to recall in an interview this week, “that the owner was in talks with a contractor to actually have both of those buildings taken down.”
