DAVENPORT, Iowa — The lawyers of Peach and Lexus Berry, two women who lived at 324 Main St. before it collapsed, have brought on a structural engineering firm to search for the catalyst behind the building's failing.
A Scott County judge filed a court order Friday afternoon demanding demolition efforts stop until Tuesday at 8 p.m., giving investigators time to survey what remains of the rubble.
Allyn Kilsheimer, CEO of KCE Structural Engineers, is working with his team to find out why The Davenport Hotel's west wall was weakened.
Kilsheimer said his team is limited in the evidence they can gather since the building has already been demolished. However, by focusing on individual pieces and prior documentation, they can rule out potential causes.
"We need to understand the condition of the west wall, what it was made of, how it was all tied together," Kilsheimer said. "We're going to come up with a list of 10, 20, 30, 40, some number of possible things that could have made it happen."
Photos of the west wall from before it fell should have made it clear that the building was in danger of collapse, according to Kilsheimer.
"What I saw in photographs of what could be known on the back wall, this building- somebody who is knowledgeable would have known you need to get the folks out of that building. Or you need to brace the wall," he said.
Compared to the Surfside Condominium collapse in 2021, which Kilsheimer has also investigated along with the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Oklahoma City Bombing, there are very few similarities to The Davenport collapse.
To Kilsheimer, the main similarities to Surfside come with the deaths and displacements that followed. Like Surfside, though, the investigation is ongoing and has no set end date. His main goal is to educate the public and city officials on what to look for to prevent any further collapses.
Watch more coverage of the collapse on News 8's YouTube channel