Parking Deck Collapse Injures Snowplow Driver in NJ

A snowplow operator in New jersey suffered minor injuries Saturday when the top deck of a parking garage he was plowing collapsed, officials said.

No one else was injured, but a car on the second level of the garage in Secaucus was destroyed.

The name of the snowplow driver wasn't released and the extent of his injuries wasn't disclosed.

The deck serves the nearby Empire Hotel.

Hotel guest Bill Ferguson of Barrington, New Jersey, had parked Friday right where the deck collapsed.

"I went out to dinner last night and moved," he told NBC 4 New York. "I got lucky."

Throughout the day, engineers escorted hotel guests to their cars so they could remove them from the garage. One of those guests was Frank Buono of Philadelphia.

"I didn't see it go into the hole," Buono said. "I saw plowing and then all of a sudden, I saw the holder with the bucket sticking out of it." 

The combined weight of the snow and the plow apparently was too much for the structure, which was roughly 50 feet long and nearly as wide.

Michael Seeve, of Mountain Development, which owns the garage, said engineers will determine what went wrong.

"We're going to make sure something like this never happens again," he said.

Town engineers have declared the entire structure as unsafe pending an analysis by a structural engineer, said Mayor Michael Gonnelli. 

"At the ground level you can see some swaying and it looks very dangerous," Gonnelli said.

The entire structure will remain closed as engineers determine whether it can be saved or not.

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