Building Evacuated Due to Fear of Roof Collapse

A Portsmouth office building was evacuated on Friday morning after employees called the Fire Department due to the fear of a roof collapse.

Firefighters were called to 200 Griffin Road around 8:45 a.m. for a report that the roof of a single-story building was starting to collapse due to heavy snow, according to emergency radio broadcasts.

"It wasn't ever in danger of collapsing," Fire Capt. Todd Germain said. "People inside noticed sprinkler heads protruding an inch through the ceiling and they called us to check out the roof."

As luck would have it, the engineer who designed the building lives nearby and showed up at the scene. He did some calculations and determined that the snow load on the building was well within the safety parameters.

Germain said the building was evacuated for under an hour as a precuation only.

"It was never in danger of collapsing, but they did have some legitimate concerns," he said. "The building was doing what it was supposed to do."

Earlier Friday, around 7:30 a.m., firefighters in Derry responded to a partial roof collapse in a mobile home at 14 Rita Avenue. No further information was immediately available.

Emergency officials have been warning about the danger of roof collapses due to the heavy rains Thursday and Friday following on the heels of a week's worth of snowfall. 

On Thursday afternoon in Weymouth, MA, a 29-year-old woman was killed when a carport collapsed on top of her. Investigators are looking into whether snow buildup caused the roof to collapse.

And just last week, a fire broke out on the roof of the new Cinemagic movie theater on Route 1 in Portsmouth when the heavy snow load damaged natural gas piping to a rooftop HVAC unit and the gas leak then ignited.