The third and last body in the rubble of a Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans was recovered more than 10 months after the building partially collapsed while it was under construction, officials said Monday.
The body, of Jose Ponce Arreola, a 63-year-old construction worker, was removed and his family has held a private memorial service, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Monday night.
“It is a terrible relief to begin finally bringing this process to an end,” she said on Twitter. “I am grateful to God that this day has finally come.”
Ms. Cantrell added: “Moving forward, we will continue to hold ownership accountable, at every level. No one wanted it to be this way, but we are grateful to the recovery team for finally getting us to this point.”
The collapse last October, in the city’s French Quarter, caused a cascade of metal and debris to fall on Canal Street on a Saturday morning. One construction worker, Anthony Magrette, 49, died during the collapse, and his body was recovered the day after the building’s partial destruction. The accident set off a precarious recovery effort to remove the bodies of Mr. Arreola and another construction worker, Quinnyon Wimberly, 36, according to the authorities.
“How do you stabilize the building and not get anyone hurt?” Fire Chief Tim McConnell said during a news conference a month after the collapse. “We need to make sure we don’t have any further loss of life or injury as we go about doing this.”
The body of Mr. Wimberly was removed from the site earlier this month.
For months, the project’s owner, 1031 Canal Development, delayed demolishing the rest of the building, blaming the delays on a series of problems, including the cost of demolition and challenges of finding a contractor qualified to demolish the structure, according to city officials.
The delays meant the bodies of Mr. Wimberly and Mr. Arreola could not be recovered from the unstable site, infuriating city officials.
“The city has been more than patient as 1031 has failed, multiple times, to engage a qualified demolition contractor and propose a safe and acceptable demolition plan,” Ms. Cantrell said in April. “But the city’s patience is not unlimited. 1031 Canal must be held accountable for their collapsed building.”
In January, firefighters had to replace a red tarp that had flown away, revealing the dangling legs of a corpse that had been wedged under the rubble since October. Two popular Mardi Gras parades announced route changes to avoid the closed-off downtown section of Canal Street where the half-destroyed building stood.
Since the collapse, several lawsuits have been filed against the developers by businesses that were damaged and people who were injured.
“The primary goal is to get to the bottom of exactly what happened, and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again,” Steve Herman and Rene Rocha, lawyers for 10 people who were injured in the collapse, said in a statement.
They have filed a lawsuit that claims the developers were negligent and failed to design the building “in a manner that could bear the loads the structure was intended to hold.”
The city said in April that it was “prepared to take action” if the Kailas family, which it named as an owner of the property, did not proceed with its fifth demolition plans to remove “this public hazard.”
The collapse took place in portions of the upper floors of a planned Hard Rock Hotel on Canal Street, which had been under construction for at least a year before it came down. The hotel’s plans called for 350 rooms, residential spaces, two ballrooms and 12,000 square feet of event space.
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