Managers: Stay away from Plaza 41

Sept. 11, 2019

The property managers for the heavily damaged Plaza 41 retail center have a message for the community: Unless you’re responding to the emergency, stay away.

“We need people out of the parking lot,” said Linda Dunham of property manager Jim Dunham & Associates. “There are so many gawkers. We don’t have the manpower to do traffic control.”

Her firm has been working through the night to remove trees and overturned cars from the property. Crews now need to get in to board up windows and assess structural integrity, she said. That’s being made more difficult by people coming to look at the damage.

For now, the only business open in the center in Subway.

“For some of the other locations, it will probably be weeks for the ones that were more heavily damaged,” Dunham said.

The Rush “was decimated,” she said. “All their windows got blown out.”

It appeared the nearby Original Pancake House was spared the worst of it. But next to that, Pizza Ranch, Tuesday Morning, Dreamers Outlet and JoAnn were heavily damaged. The fabric and craft store is sending in its own emergency response team, Dunham said.

“It’s a pretty catastrophic thing, but we’re just hitting it. That’s all we can do,” she said. “We’re fortunate in this community we have good partnerships. Engineers were here at 4 a.m. The support has been overwhelming. It can always be worse. I just keep reminding myself no one got hurt.”

Plaza 41 LLC, which owns the property, is working with a structural engineer “within the next 24 to 48 hours to analyze the damage that’s occurred and make recommendations with regard to the repairs that need to be made to the roof and the structure of the building. No one has made any determination without having engineers out to look at it,” said Dan Donohue, the LLC’s managing member.

“There was some damage to a section of the roof. It was a brand-new roof put on in the last 10 years, so the remainder should be in pretty good shape, but we really want the engineers to tell us that. Obviously, we’ve been in communication with all the tenants over there. I believe each of the tenants will be looking at the interior of their space to see what the damage is there and working with their professionals to determine what needs to be done on the interior.”

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Managers: Stay away from Plaza 41

The property managers for the heavily damaged Plaza 41 retail center have a message for the community: Unless you’re responding to the emergency, stay away.

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