New London — A year ago on Saturday, the spire of the First Congregational Church collapsed onto the lower section of the Union Street house of worship, setting into motion a chain of events that led to the demolition of the 174-year-old city landmark and the property’s planned rebirth as an apartment complex.
But the reason for the failure has been a lingering — and unanswered — question since the afternoon of Jan. 25, 2024 when stunned observers on State Street looked up to a diminished city skyline.
A new executive summary, the only formal conclusion released, was sent to city officials this month by a professional engineer who walked the collapse site and dug into the church’s history in an effort to glean what went wrong.
Possible contributing factors included initial construction flaws worsened by long-deferred maintenance, along with repair work that may have made those simmering issues worse — all which came to a head after days of wildly fluctuating temperatures.
No mandate to investigate
With the dust from the collapsed rubble still drifting from the site, city officials on the day of the catastrophe reached out to New London-based e2 Engineers to determine the stability of the remaining structure.
A recommendation was quickly made to raze the church, which was deemed a public safety hazard. Once that task was completed, the city’s role was largely over, Mayor Michael Passero said this week.
Passero said at the time of the collapse the property was owned by a private group, Engaging Heaven Ministries, and the city had no authority to order a formal investigation into the disaster.
“If there were any injuries, it would be a different story,” he said. “But it wasn’t in the public interest to pay for an expensive investigation. And (Engaging Heaven) didn’t have the money for that either.”
But Elizabeth Acly opted to continue digging into the collapse as a sort of academic exercise designed to satisfy her curiosity and possibly prevent similar building failures from occurring.
Acly, a structural engineer specializing in historic buildings and forensic analysis for the Cirrus Structural Engineering firm, was subcontracted by e2 to supplement its assessment work.
“I was never given an objective of finding a cause, and there was sort of a gray area on whether we were going to come up with an underlying cause,” Acly said on Thursday. “There was no mandate.”
But Acly, who has worked on several local engineering projects, including one to repair the Ledge Light lighthouse, said she knew the site offered the chance to conduct a “holistic” investigation into a building disaster.
She said she almost immediately butted up against an access problem.
“I did walk the site on the last day of demolition and didn’t find much, just a small piece of wall,” Acly said.
She never got permission to enter the property again, even when its new owners, the Eastern Connecticut Housing Opportunities (ECHO) group, began last fall removing the mountain of twisted wood, granite and other debris from the site ahead of its plans to construct a multi-story apartment building.
Acly pushed back on any idea that the church remnants were too pulverized to be of any use.
“To a trained eye, we can find things, like the condition of tie rods and mortar for sampling,” she said. “There was more we could do at the site.”
In her summary to the city, Acly noted her inability to access the site stymied her attempts to reach a definitive conclusion on the collapse.
“At this time, we do not expect to be able to continue, nor conclude, our investigation,” Acly wrote in the Jan. 16 summary memo.
But ECHO President and CEO and President Julie Savin said Friday no one reached out to her requesting access to the property.
“That’s all news to me,” she said. “I would have loved to have someone out there as the work was done.”
It seems no one extended a formal invitation offering to open the rubble site for investigation, but nor did anyone make a request to do so.
Longstanding problems
In lieu of direct access, Acly turned instead to historical building records and the few available photos of the church’s interior. Those assets enabled her to identify three possible causes of the collapse: initial design and construction flaws; decades of deferred maintenance; and prior repair attempts that may have exacerbated other problems.
“It’s a lot of cumulative things and it takes a perfect alignment of things to happen to cause a failure,” she said.
Acly said it’s unclear whether the church was constructed with proper tower buttressing, and the original mortar may have been of questionable durability. She noted repairs were being made to the church less than a decade after its construction was complete in 1851. In addition, the church’s two “skins,” the outer wall and an inner one bonded by timber rubble, may not have adhered correctly, creating another potential weak point.
“If water gets in, mortar and bonding timber deteriorates, as can the iron and steel rods that can serve as extra building supports,” she said.
Conversely, if the church’s masonry couldn’t properly expel moisture due to well-meaning, but incorrect repairs, it could lead to a buildup of water that over time becomes another infrastructure stressor.
Like a giant Jenga tower, the church contained various building support redundancies, such as buttressing, masonry and tie-rods. As each redundancy was compromised, the likelihood of the church tumbling down increased.
Acly, in her official summary, rated her conclusions to a low to fair degree of certainty.”
And then there’s the trigger.
“Buildings like these have a lot of redundancies,” she said. “You can remove stone after stone, and the building load re-distributes itself. And that can go on until there’s a point of no return and everything’s overwhelmed.”
The trigger?
Acly said the possible tipping point that led to the spire’s fall may have been weather-related.
“There was undulating warm-to-cold and cold-to-warm weather that month, along with heavy precipitation days before the collapse,” she said.
Weather charts leading up to last year’s collapse show highs near 56 degrees on Jan. 13 before the mercury plummeted to below zero on Jan. 21. Temperatures swung back up to 52 degrees by noon on Jan. 25, an hour before the spire fell.
“So, you have all this frozen material suddenly thawing and there’s no more redundancy in the system,” she said.
Acly said the First Congregational Church disaster highlighted the issues faced by owners of similar buildings, including a lack of maintenance and repair funding, along with the importance of hiring a professional to conduct building assessments.
“There’s a disconnect between what a church means to a community and the congregation’s ability to support those buildings,” she said. “State grants are very competitive and only offer limited funding.”
Acly said her employer, Cirrus, is willing to continue its investigation into the church disaster but needs pre-collapse photos of the building’s tower, sanctuary, vestibule and other areas to examine. Anyone with such pictures is asked to send them to cirrus@cirruseng.com.
Through the window from his upper-story office at City Hall, Passero for the last year has watched the Union Street property evolve from an active worship site and broken landmark to a rubble pile. On Wednesday, the site had been scraped clean of debris except for a relatively small hill of granite set to be incorporated into the planned 46-unit apartment building. with commercial space.
“We’ve seen that property transferred to a new owner, the materials removed and a site plan for new work approved,” he said. “But, it seems like it’s been longer than a year since that steeple fell.
j.penney@theday.com