By Ayala Ben-Yehuda
Fifteen decks in the area of Bayside surveyed door-to-door by Department of Buildings inspectors following the fatal collapse of a deck on 221st Street Aug. 9 had minor defects, a Buildings Department spokesman said Tuesday.
The no-questions-asked safety inspections, conducted between Bell Boulevard, 35th Avenue/Corbett Road, the Cross Island Parkway and Northern Boulevard, yielded a total of 1,336 visits by inspectors, Buildings Department spokesman Sid Dinsay said.
The inspections were the result of a deck collapse during a birthday party that killed one woman and injured three others.
Occupants were not home in about a 10th of the visits, meaning that inspectors left notices, said Dinsay. About 145 of the homes were found to have decks, 15 of them with minor defects.
Dinsay could not elaborate on the nature of the defects but said they were “obviously nothing that would require us to vacate the deck,” such as “a structural concern or danger of imminent collapse.”
Dinsay could not comment on whether the defective decks were built by Steven C. Gaetano, identified to the Buildings Department by local residents as the builder of the deck that collapsed.
A message left for the Ossining, N.Y.-based builder with the same name was not returned as of press time Tuesday.
