Submitting to a rare self-inspection, Baltimore officials formally initiated a review yesterday of their technique for toppling middle-of-the-block rowhouses.
As the city hired a consultant to examine its demolition procedures, experts interviewed by The Sun raised fundamental questions about the city's razings of aged rowhouses between other aged rowhouses -- all locked together by bricks, mortar and lumber that often date to the last century.
"Before you tear down a midblock house, you ought to be doing some very serious engineering to make sure the walls are going to stand," said Randy Johnson, a home improvement contractor who began renovating Baltimore rowhouses 20 years ago.
Added Tim Sibol, a structural engineer in Baltimore: "The first thing you need to do is go in and make sure you know what you've got before you start."
Zack Germroth, spokesman for Housing Commissioner Daniel P. Henson III, acknowledged, "We do not have structural engineers examining in any great detail the adjoining properties."
But now, he said, the city is considering hiring such engineers to examine adjacent properties -- before the wrecking crew comes.
The city's review and reforms were spurred by twin collapses in the past two weeks.
First, on Mount Street, a brick wall that had been part of a demolished rowhouse collapsed June 19 onto a neighboring house, shaking a family from its sleep and slightly injuring six people. Within hours, the wrecked house was demolished.
Then on Thursday, a renovated house in the 200 block of N. Montford Ave. crumbled while a front-end loader was cleaning up debris from the demolition next door. No one was in the house at the time and there were no injuries. That house, too, had to be razed -- just two months after its new owner had moved in.
After the Montford Avenue collapse, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke called a halt to midblock demolitions and ordered the assessment of city methods.
The questions are the latest directed at Henson's accelerated demolition campaign, which aims to bring down 1,000 houses this year and thousands more in the next few years.
Those questions first came this April, in a Sun series examining the pitfalls and problems surrounding Baltimore's rush to remove houses in a city filled with up to 40,000 vacant or decaying properties.
More recently, the newspaper reported how Henson had publicly understated the number of midblock demolitions; housing officials acknowledged the error as a "communication problem."
