Mayor meets with residents over E. 26th Street collapse

City and CSX Transportation maintenance crews did not do a good job responding to repeated complaints from residents about street damage on the Baltimore block that collapsed in the spring, according to the city's transportation director and a report reviewing previous inspections.

The city of Baltimore issued the report Sunday analyzing the April 30 collapse of a stretch of East 26th Street after massive rainfall. The report noted that neither CSX nor city maintenance crews who responded to several resident complaints about the roadway before the disaster had the expertise to identify the surface issues as symptomatic of a larger failure of the street's subsurface.

While the report revealed a lack of coordination between the two entities and a lack of thoroughness in infrastructure inspections, it did not conclusively say what caused the collapse other than an unusually cold and wet winter.

"While we look at available information and discuss possible scenarios, the definitive conditions which ultimately caused the collapse remain inconclusive due to the lack of exploratory information which may not become available even during the extensive excavation of the failure area during the reconstruction phase," the report said.

On Sunday, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake met with several of the residents who were forced to temporarily leave their homes in the spring after a 120-year-old retaining wall failed after heavy rainstorms, causing much of the street to collapse. The meeting was to go over the results of the report Rawlings-Blake had ordered from city transportation and public works employees about the history of inspections and repairs to the street and complaints from residents.

"This is about getting to the bottom of what happened and why," Rawlings-Blake said after the meeting.

She said residents were given a timetable for repairs and were told of the changes city officials had made to ensure that streets, bridges and walls are thoroughly inspected.

The changes include sending out engineers to do ground testing of streets that receive more than one complaint and deploying city workers and inspectors to review the city's aging infrastructure after major rainstorms such as the deluge the city saw last week, which flooded some streets, particularly in Southeast Baltimore.

Some residents have hired lawyers to seek reparations from the city and CSX after being forced to relocate to city-paid hotels or making other living arrangements for weeks while structural engineers studied the collapse to make sure their homes were not in danger.

"We saw that the city appears to admit that mistakes were made, and we're happy with that," said Jeff Bowman, an attorney who represents five properties.

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Mayor meets with residents over E. 26th Street collapse