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Toppled crane shatters store roof and nerves

By AMBER MOBLEY
Published October 19, 2005

TAMPA - Coffee at Panera Bread in Carrollwood on Tuesday morning came with an extra kick.

Angela West, sipping a soda, thought an earthquake had hit.

A loud crash shook the building. Plaster and pieces of wall and ceiling crumbled and fell near her.

"I didn't need any coffee after that," said West, 38, of Seminole.

Outside Panera Bread, at Dale Mabry Highway and Fletcher Avenue, a crane had tipped over. It sliced through the restaurant's uppermost facade, carving a 4-foot hole in the roof, authorities said. The truck attached to the crane was left suspended in the air.

"A few moms in there instantly grabbed their kids and ran," West said. "People were kind of scattering toward the exit."

No one was injured.

The crane tipped while trying to move a concrete piece of facade from atop Panera's roof, said Ray Yeakley, a Hillsborough County Fire Rescue spokesman.

Fire rescue workers evacuated customers and staff members inside Panera - about 40 people - as well as those in the adjacent Johnston's Hallmark and Fantastic Sams.

The sight from inside Hallmark was surreal, said employee Andrea Grimes. "All we could see was a truck suspended in midair."

With the truck tilted at about a 45-degree angle, Hallmark manager Colleen Ryan worried about a possible explosion. "There's propane on the back of the truck, and we've got helium inside the store," she said.

Hallmark employees turned off the helium before they evacuated and waited in the parking lot with other evacuees, construction workers and onlookers, some of whom took pictures of the truck with their cellular phones.

Fire rescue officials also called Tampa Electric to shut off the gas as a precaution, Yeakley said.

Shops at the Village Center are getting new fronts. SIKON Construction, the company in charge of the strip mall's facelift, subcontracted the roofs to Nu-Tec Roofing Contractors. It was Nu-Tec's crane that fell into Panera. A Nu-Tec site supervisor at the scene would not comment.

A Stepp's Towing Service truck set the Nu-Tec truck and crane back on the ground after about two hours, and the stores were allowed to reopen for business in the early afternoon.

[Last modified October 19, 2005, 00:29:13]