An Iowa woman who found herself pinned by a pile of rubble for hours after a century-old apartment building suddenly collapsed Sunday was forced to have her leg amputated so that she could be rescued, her wife has revealed.
Quanishia and Lexus Berry were sitting in their fourth-floor apartment in Davenport, Iowa, with their two cats Sunday evening when they spotted a crack above their bathroom doorway, Quad-City Times reported.
Sensing that something was wrong, the couple grabbed their pets and ran for the front door, but they were too late.
“The moment that we hit the door, it started to shake and rattle and literally … it all just happened in the blink of a second — the floors caved in, like collapsed,” Lexus Berry, a local artist, recounted Wednesday. “So as the floors were falling, and [Quanishia] was falling four stories down, there were still two stories above her falling and two stories falling above me. It was all crumbling.”
The 116-year-old, six-story building in Davenport partially collapsed around 5 p.m. Sunday.
Lexus made it out of the building in the nick of time, but her wife, known to loved ones as “Peach,” ended up trapped beneath a mound of bricks and twisted steel.
Lexus stayed close by and urged first responders and work crews to continue searching for her wife, who she believed was still alive.
After hours of digging, rescuers finally found Peach Berry wedged in debris and determined that one of her legs would need to be amputated to pull her out.
Lexus said she was given a chance to briefly see Peach before the emergency surgery.
Wearing a hard hat and accompanied by three or four rescuers, Lexus walked through the building in the dark until she finally saw her wife.
“I’ll never forget that image of the way she was trapped,” she said. “I just got to say, ‘I love you, you’re OK, you got this. Don’t worry.’”
Seven hours after the initial collapse, doctors removed Peach’s leg on site and rushed her to a hospital, mindful that the remainder of the building could come down at any time.
“It’s definitely something that’s like a miracle that she’s here,” Lexus said. “Due to the circumstances, they had to make a judgment call. And that’s the best thing for her, honestly, because she’s still here.”
Peach remained sedated in the hospital and was breathing with the help of a ventilator.
Her wife wrote on Facebook Wednesday that she underwent a second surgery that day.
Lexus said she was still trying to come to grips with what had happened and prepare herself for what’s to come.
“It’s just the feeling of knowing that she’s hurt, hurts me. I hate to see her in pain,” she said.
The couple have been together for nine years, nearly three of them married.
Lexus said her wife — nicknamed Peach “because she’s so sweet” — has been known to put other people first and take care of them in times of sickness.
“To be able to do that for her is very important,” Lexus said.
Lexus is looking for a new wheelchair-accessible one-story rental home where she could take care of her wife. A friend has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for Peach’s medical and housing expenses.
Meanwhile, five residents of the unstable building in Davenport remained unaccounted for and officials feared at least two of them might be stuck in a mound of debris.
Officials have said the building is continuing to shift and they need to knock it down, but they think any effort to find remains in the debris could cause the rest of the structure to crash.
The initial plan was to begin preparing the site for demolition Tuesday, but the efforts were put on hold after a woman was found Monday evening.
Davenport Police Chief Jeff Bladel said there were 53 tenants in the 80-unit building, and now most of them are struggling to find housing. They have not been allowed into the apartments to retrieve belongings, though crews were able to rescue some pets Tuesday.
City officials on Wednesday night released hundreds of pages of documents pertaining to the condition of the building, including structural engineering reports, violation notices and resident complaints, according to the Quad-City Times.
Among the documents was an inspection report by Select Structural Engineering, hired by building owner Andrew Wold to advise on building work, that described patches of brick façade that were separating from the building.
The report noted bulging that needed to be secured to “keep the entire face of the building from falling away when the bottom area(s) come loose.”
Wold released a statement dated Tuesday, his first comments since the partial collapse, saying “our thoughts and prayers are with our tenants” and that his company, Davenport Hotel, L.L.C., is working with agencies to help them.
That same day, the city of Davenport filed an enforcement action against Wold, saying he had failed to maintain the property “in a safe, sanitary, and structurally sound condition” before the collapse.
The city is seeking a $300 fine.
With Post wires
