WARWICK, R.I. -- Judy Gendron and her four friends had just sat down to eat on the small deck on the side of her condominium here recently when they heard a loud cracking noise. Seconds later, they were falling to the ground, with a second deck overhead crashing down and pinning them in the rubble. The five women, from their mid 30s to early 70s, suffered injuries ranging from a broken hip to a broken foot and ribs and facial injuries, according to their lawyer. Warwick firefighters had to use an air bag to lift some of the structure and chain saws to cut away the rest. Afterward, the ledger board -- the heavy plank that connected the deck to the condo -- attracted the attention of city building inspectors. You could clearly see about 12 nails, still fairly straight, and three shiny lag bolts, which are large screws. And you could see they had all been fastened on top of the building's shingles. All three features suggest why the deck fell so dramatically. Around the country, hundreds of people are injured by failing decks and the little secret that is well known to building experts, but not the public, is that in almost every case the decks collapse because inadequate fastening allows them to pull away from buildings. What's worse, the failures almost always happen in the summer, when families are celebrating out on their decks, creating the loads that rip them down. "I would make a strong suggestion that anyone with a deck should determine how it is connected to the house," says Robert Falk, a federal forest products scientist who has spent 15 years studying and writing about deck failures. "If you don't see lag bolts, I wouldn't use it. There's been a lot of people killed on decks and it's usually that connection." City inspectors suspect that the ledger boards of the Greenbrier Condominium decks were originally nailed into place. At some later date, it appears, a few lag bolts were added, but the number was inadequate. Building codes across the country require that decks be fastened to houses with heavy steel bolts and washers at regular intervals. At a minimum, heavy lag screws should be used. Nails are prohibited. They allow decks to be pulled away as easily as someone with a hammer pulls a nail out of wood. Warwick last weekend became another statistic of deck failures around the country. Last month, three people were injured in Everett, Wash., when their deck separated from the house and fell to the ground. About 30 people were taking part in a graduation party in Evesham, Pa., when the deck they were on broke free of the house and fell down. Two people were hurt. The next day, two building inspectors from other communities wrote to an International Code Council online bulletin board asking for something to be done. One wrote: "Three deck collapses in one weekend. It's time . . . to adopt comprehensive deck design provisions to help prevent problems with new decks in the next couple decades." There is no way of knowing how many other deck collapses have occurred, because no governmental entity keeps track of such statistics. But a recent study done by a company that makes hardware to strengthen decks found that between 2000 and 2006, 33 people were killed and 1,122 were injured in 179 deck collapses across the country. The worst, no doubt, was in Chicago in 2003, when 12 young people were killed and 57 injured when decks collapsed during a party. Some 800,000 new decks were built in 2005 alone, so the problem is not going to go away, according to the study by Michael Morse, who founded DeckLok Bracket Systems to make decks safer. At the same time, Morse found the number of decks collapsing is increasing at a rate of 21 percent each year, with most collapses, by far, occurring in the summer, when decks are heavily used. The most common cause, cited in more than 90 percent of all collapses, is failure of the ledger board connection to the house. "Decks deteriorate," says Warren Ducharme, an architect with the Rhode Island Building Commission. "Companies say the wood is rated for 40 years, but give it 20." Ducharme says many people don't maintain their decks, or they misuse them -- sometimes putting kiddie pools on decks not designed to support such weight. E-mail Peter Lord at plord(at)projo.com (Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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