'When you look at the papers this morning don't you see the faces of your own children, sons and daughters, at the start of a great adventure in life." Taoiseach Enda Kenny's comments captured well the sense in which the tragic deaths in Berkeley struck at an entire generation. Olivia Burke, Eimear Walsh, Eoghan Culligan, Niccolai Schuster, Lorcán Miller and Ashley Donohoe. off on a great jaunt. Never coming back."You are neither here nor there," the note left yesterday at the flats by fellow students quoted from Seamus Heaney. Our hearts too go out to the bereaved, the injured and their families.
The rite of passage that is the J-1 visa programme has been part of the experience of so many families – more than 150,000 Irish students have used it to visit the United States in the last 50 years, 8,000 last summer, and a further 7,000 this year, 700 of them in the Bay Area. For most it has been a memorable, challenging and usually hugely rewarding first step in life away from the family, an immersion both into a new culture and into the world of work – they work hard and play hard, the people of Berkeley kept telling reporters yesterday of their welcome annual influx.
That sense of often raucous solidarity, of binding with their own abroad, which many students make part of their J-1 experience, and which both enhances the intensity of the experience and helps them make it in the US, was, ironically, their undoing. The collapse of the balcony party in the Library Gardens apartment on Kittredge Street was no random car accident or drive-by shooting, but a 21st birthday celebration, a chance to reaffirm their collective identity, as it happens, in tragedy. It is little surprise that, sadly, many are contemplating abandoning the rest of their holidays.
It is crucial that the authorities move quickly, as they have promised, to establish the cause/causes of the collapse. Initial inspections of photographs from the scene by engineers for several media outlets have suggested a flaw in the waterproofing of the join between the balcony and the building may have allowed water ingress to rot the wooden joists. The investigation must also ask probing questions about the inspections of the completed work, notably the last, back in 2007, what was found, and what was missed.
But, apart from any possible construction defects, worryingly, local building regulations also appear to have serious shortcomings. This was an accident waiting to happen. Balconies are required only to be able to withstand weights of 60 pounds per square foot – in this case roughly 1,800 lbs, or the collective weight of only ten average Americans. Some 13 students are believed to have been on the balcony when it collapsed. And, unlike lifts, there is no requirement for warning notices .