Katharine Wilson

The Capital, Annapolis, Md.

(TNS)

A 10-story Glen Burnie office building was evacuated Thursday afternoon after its underground parking garage experienced a shift in one of its floors.

About 100 people were evacuated from the Empire Towers building safely, as officials began assessing any damage. No injuries have been reported.

The parking garage was undergoing construction work when the shift happened, according to Capt. Jennifer Macallair, a spokesperson for the Anne Arundel County Fire Department.

“There has not been a collapse,” Macallair said. “There is a structural integrity issue after some work was being done in the below-ground parking garage.”

Macallair said that no floors in the building had collapsed and that the damage was only on the second floor of the parking garage. No cars were damaged, she said.

The building is at 7310 Ritchie Highway. Drivers were advised to avoid the area.

Anne Arundel County structural engineers were on-site around 5 p.m. Thursday, Macallair said, to assess the structural integrity of the building. As of that time, there was no estimate on when the engineers would complete their assessment.

Officials wearing hard hats posted yellow signs on neighboring businesses that read “notice unsafe building,” around 5:35 p.m.

Power is shut off in the building, Macallair said. One of the offices in the building is a blood bank, from which fire department officials were able to recover 50 pints of blood and turn them over to the Red Cross, according to Macallair.

At about 4:30 p.m. Anne Arundel County and Glen Burnie Volunteer firefighters were on scene, just in case.

The area immediately around the building was blocked off to cars while the safety assessment was underway.

Dispatchers were called around 2:30 p.m., Macallair said, for a possible building collapse. Workers at the parking garage told responders, she added, that the structural integrity of the building had been compromised.

“Out of abundance of caution, we evacuated everybody out of the building,” Macallair said. “We could see that there was some structural integrity issues on that level of the parking garage, but there was no actual collapse of the floor.”

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