Porch safety: Chicago says it's up to you

Inspections scaled back 6 years after Lincoln Park collapse killed 13 people

Like thousands of porches in Chicago, the rickety landing where Atit Mansuria and Carolina Landeros were chatting hadn't been inspected for years -- in this case, since it was built in the mid-1980s.

Its railing suddenly broke open like a gate, sending them tumbling 20 feet to the concrete alley below. Landeros, 20, fractured her neck, but is now recovering. Mansuria, 27, suffered severe head injuries and remains hospitalized.

The accident in May appears on a list of about 700 complaints phoned into the city's 311 system this year in what serves as the Department of Buildings' best gauge of the potential hazards lurking beneath porch barbecues and apartment deck parties this summer.

Six years after a catastrophic porch collapse in Lincoln Park killed 13 people and forced a Chicago-wide crackdown on dangerous porches, the city has returned to a more passive vigilance of the hazards. While city officials say their hard work has reduced the potential threats, a shortage of inspection manpower and a continuing stream of newly reported cases mean that bad porches often are discovered only haphazardly -- and sometimes too late.

In the wake of the Lincoln Park tragedy, the city identified about 500 bad porches in a citywide sweep and set up a special task force of porch inspectors. But that unit was disbanded in 2006 after most of the initial hazards were fixed, Buildings Department spokesman Bill McCaffrey said.

Ten of those cases are still bogged down in legal proceedings, a mixture of abandoned properties, single-family homes and small apartment buildings with negligent landlords, according to a city review prompted by a Tribune Freedom of Information Act request.

The city has a team of 43 "conservation" inspectors who received training in porch inspections since the task force was disbanded. But they combine checks on rodent infestations, structural damage and other hazards with annual scrutiny of porches in apartment buildings taller than three stories, McCaffrey said. That amounts to inspecting about 5,000 porches out of Chicago's roughly 680,200 residential properties. Last year, another 3,400 porch inspections were triggered by new permits issued.

All other checkups are triggered solely by complaints on the city's 311 line -- a catch-as-catch-can system that relies on the vigilance of apartment tenants and homeowners who may not know what makes porches safe, critics say. The number of 311 calls for porches has fallen in recent years -- to 1,775 last year from 2,443 in 2006 -- but the critics argue that doesn't mean that there are fewer hazards.

"If I lived in the city of Chicago and I had a wooden porch, regardless of age ... on a yearly basis I'd call up the city and say, 'Come out and inspect my porch,' " said attorney Patrick Murphy, who has been suing building owners and the city on behalf of porch-collapse victims in Chicago for 35 years.

"It's continually a problem that owners of the building and property managers are not properly maintaining their porches and, therefore, the tenants -- who are the users -- are at risk," said Murphy, who represents Landeros and Mansuria in a lawsuit against the building owner at 1005 S. Racine Ave. in University Village.

Murphy also represents nine families affected by the Lincoln Park collapse in wrongful-death and personal-injury lawsuits against building owner L.G. Properties. The cases are collectively inching toward a settlement.

That tragedy led to the adoption of one of the nation's strictest building codes for newly constructed porches and prompted inspectors and city attorneys to step up scrutiny of building owners who ignored porch hazards for years.

The effort to fix many of the 500 dangerous porches was delayed by a backlog in inspections, landlord resistance and a bogged-down Cook County Housing Court system. With most of those problems now fixed, McCaffrey said the once high-priority list of porch addresses "hadn't been maintained or updated for several years. It took us a while to find it."

Noting the city's stretched manpower, McCaffrey defended the current inspection regimen, saying it's up to building owners and tenants to be vigilant.

"If you call me today with a porch complaint, it's on the inspectors' list tomorrow," though it can take several weeks for an actual inspection to occur, he said. "We just don't have the resources to annually inspect every porch in the city. Nor do I think we want to get into that business [of over-policing owners]. As it is, the inspectors have a lot of work."

A scan of the nearly 2,500 complaints phoned in since January 2008 presents a cacophony of worried tenants and neighbors warning the city about potential injuries.

In several cases, the phoned-in warnings came too late.

Tonya Laramore watched in horror last August as her granddaughter Jermarih Cook, then 2, lay crying on the floor beneath the porch landing behind her West Town apartment. The child's mouth was full of blood after a rotted step collapsed under her weight and she fell 6 feet, Laramore said.

"Her tooth went up through the top of her lip and left a big hole," Laramore recalled. Before the accident, "We had called [the building property manager] to complain that the steps were loose and that some were missing and they never did anything."

City inspectors came out a few days after the accident, but a new porch wasn't installed until last month, she said.

In May, Douglas Ames was using the porch steps behind his second-floor apartment in Portage Park to take out the garbage when a landing plank gave way and he fell partially through.

"It was just a real old porch," said Ames, 56, who suffered torn leg ligaments and is suing his landlord for medical expenses and lost wages after being forced out of work for a month. "This has affected my ability to support my kids."

The landlord, Jeff Bravo, said he didn't realize the structure was in such bad shape.

"I want to keep the place up to code," said Bravo, who has placed a larger wood plank over the damage while waiting for repair estimates to arrive. A sign warns tenants to stay off the structure.

In West Rogers Park, Kashif Khundmiri has for several months feared that a rotting porch system in an abandoned apartment building next to his family's house could present an open invitation to neighborhood children playing nearby.

Court records show that city officials have been trying to force the owner of the building at 6424 N. Sacramento Ave. to make repairs since 2007.

Khundmiri said he and other neighbors called 311 several times since the spring, with no action, before the structure finally collapsed in May.

"It was leaning on the [telephone] wires," he said, standing near one gnarled porch staircase separated from the building that ascended to nowhere. "It really is a potential danger."

In the case of the porch in University Village, the damage has not been fixed pending the legal proceedings, said Murphy, the attorney.

He declined to make either of the two victims available for comment, citing their lingering trauma from the accident. But Kapil Mokhat, Mansuria's brother-in-law, said he suspected there was something wrong with the structure each time he visited the apartment and climbed the "shaky" stairs.

"I told them: 'You should report it,' " Mokhat recalled. "I guess they never did."

Robert Valente, who bought the two-story building in 2006, said he was unaware there were any problems with the porch.

"It wasn't unsound," Valente said. "I've been on it. Had I known [the porch was unsafe], this would never be an issue."

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