Roof of vacant, condemned Anchorage warehouse partially collapses under snow load

The roof of a vacant warehouse in an industrial patch of Midtown Anchorage partially collapsed overnight Wednesday. Nobody was on hand or hurt.

According to the owner, the building was empty and slated for demolition.

The warehouse at 4640 Gambell St. damaged Wednesday is owned by Marten Martensen, the primary owner of the Continental Auto Group in Anchorage. He was part of a group that purchased the property in October 2022 and briefly used it to store around 10,000 tires until last December’s successive snowstorms caused the structure to begin collapsing.

“We promptly called a contractor, he shored it up. And the building was condemned,” Martensen said Wednesday.

The company didn’t store anything there this winter, and had arranged for the building to be demolished.

The incident marks at least the second time this winter that a commercial structure has failed. Last week, a huge portion of the roof at Spenard Builders Supply’s dispatch center was destroyed under the season’s record-breaking snow load. In November, local officials issued guidance to commercial building owners to keep roofs clear of accumulation in order to avoid risking catastrophic damage.

Last winter, at least 16 buildings in the municipality collapsed, which building officials attributed to the heavy snow loads exacerbating decades-old design flaws in commercial construction.

According to Martensen, an engineer who inspected the warehouse on Gambell Street found multiple design flaws, some of which was from construction dating back to the 1950s.

“The original building was wood trusses, and those trusses were under-built and also designed poorly,” Martensen said. “Those are the ones that failed in the collapsed section.”

Another section of the building was constructed in the 1970s, and some of the metal used was warped, Martensen said.