A Rockville Centre landmark in peril

A 23-year-old building in Rockville Centre is showing signs of age.

On the afternoon of Nov. 23, the white office building at 2 Lincoln Ave. was evacuated when Building Department officials determined that it could potentially fall down after a major column broke in its parking garage, directly under the building.

The village responded to the emergency by notifying police and fire personnel, along with the Pill Fence Company of Oceanside, which erected structural supports to shore up the garage after the incident.

The columns in the 2 Lincoln Ave. parking garage consist of steel beams encased in concrete shells. Building Department Superintendent Dan Casella said he noticed some rusting in the beams during an inspection the morning of the collapse.

It is likely that the rusting resulted from water leaking into the columns and becoming trapped between the steel and concrete. As it turns out, crews have been working at the building recently and have stripped away the concrete as part of an ongoing repair project, compromising four columns.

Engineers from H2M, an architectural and engineering company in Melville that consults for the village, inspected the garage and the building on the day of the collapse and worked through the following afternoon. It was determined that of approximately 30 columns in the parking garage, in addition to the major column that failed, an additional four had been compromised.

However, Mickey Chan, one of the company’s engineers, told the Building Department that the structure was most likely safe and not in imminent danger of collapse.

“We’re still really not sure right now in regard to the whole situation, ” a village spokesman said this week.

The building at 2 Lincoln Ave. was completed in 1987. It has undergone periodic inspections over the years, along with numerous alterations to its internal structure.

On Monday, the village was in the process of submitting a remediation plan for repairs. The goal, according to Casella, is to shore up the compromised areas — the four weak columns — and make the building stable and safe again.

The building’s parking garage has two decks, and the building itself has five levels, including a ground level. There are a number of businesses in the building, including several related to the medical field as well as the State Bank of Long Island and Hatsis Laser Vision.

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