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 But the consensus among structural engineers interviewed by
Reuters was that the fourth-floor balcony should otherwise have been
sturdy enough, under normal circumstances, to safely bear the weight
of the 13 people who were on the deck at the time.
All 13, mostly college students from Ireland working in the San
Francisco Bay Area for the summer on temporary visas, plunged to the
street below when the balcony gave way during a birthday celebration
on Tuesday.
Splintered wooden support joists, which experts said were visibly
decayed, were left protruding from the building's outer wall after
the platform crashed onto a vacant third-floor balcony just below
it.
Three men and three women in their early 20s, including an American
friend of the Irish students, died in the collapse, and seven others
were hospitalized.
Students and community members joined other mourners at a memorial
mass for the victims on Wednesday evening in nearby Oakland.
 "Today, all of Ireland embraces these young people and their
families," said Father Aidan McAleenan, an Irish-born priest, in a
homily before a few hundred people gathered at the Cathedral of
Christ the Light.
"The worst thing that can happen in life is to lose a child. What we
can do now is to pray, to love, and to care for each other."
After the service, about 350 students lit candles and held a silent
vigil in a Berkeley park near the site of the accident.
The integrity of the stucco-over-wood-frame construction at the
Library Gardens apartment complex, near the University of California
at Berkeley, immediately came under scrutiny as city inspectors
began to examine the accident site.
Municipal officials declined to discuss the condition of the
balcony's underlying structure or speculate on what caused the
collapse.
But three Bay-area structural engineers and a building inspector
from New York who examined pictures from the site all agreed that
wood rot from moisture seeping into the balcony's support beams was
a likely factor.
Alvin Ubell, founder and chief inspector of Accurate Building
Inspectors in New York City, and other experts agreed that defects
in the design, installation and maintenance of waterproofing,
flashing materials and ventilation could leave untreated wood
framing especially vulnerable to decay.
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Otherwise, they said the use of wooden timbers to support
cantilevered platforms in such construction was commonplace.
Structural failures accounted for about 5,600 injuries from
balcony-related falls from 1990 to 2006, according to data collected
by the Center for Injury Research and Policy in Columbus, Ohio, and
published in 2009 by the American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
As for questions of weight, Derrick Hom, the Oakland-based president
of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California, said
the crowd on the deck may have come close to the balcony's maximum
design capacity but "probably was not the critical deciding factor."
Taryn Williams, a forensic engineering specialist in San Francisco,
and Berkeley-based engineer Joshua Kardon, who visited the site,
agreed, assuming the students were not doing anything to put undue
strain on the deck, such as jumping up and down.
Hom and his fellow experts dismissed any suggestion the balcony,
measuring only about 30 square feet, was designed more as an
architectural flourish than as a functional balcony space.
They said any outside deck with a door, which the balcony had, would
only be permitted if designed and built to full code.
The deck below the fallen balcony was also to be removed after being
tested and found to be unsound after the accident, a spokeswoman for
Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates said.
(Reporting by Emmett Berg in Berkeley, California and Steve Gorman
from Los Angeles; Editing by Larry King)
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reserved.]
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