Following years worth of water freezing and thawing on the roof, a section of the Packard Plant roof collapsed 5 stories, April 2010. Following the collapse, a friend of mine gave me the news, but I was unwilling to believe it. I had been standing on the very area of the roof that he had claimed collapsed less than a week prior. Presuming he and I had mis-communicated about the exact location, I took a ride over to the plant and was surprised to find that we had indeed been talking about the same spot. As I (carefully) walked around the collapse taking photos, I thought back to how solid the roof seemed when I was standing on it a few days before and felt a knot grow in my stomach. Initially, we presumed scrappers had done this, however it looked a little too chaotic for their work and began to wonder whether we should expect a corpse underneath all that rubble. A few months later, while digging through some old photos, I was able to attribute the collapse to weathering, per my photo 'Winter 2009'.

   

Author

Nicolas Boileau

Albums

• Packard Plant - Detroit