FOX 8 has been poring over GPS records from the vehicle fleet for the City of New Orleans Department of Safety and Permits following the Oct. 12 collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel construction site that killed three men.
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FOX 8 has uncovered three different inspectors who claimed to have visited the construction site but their vehicle was not close to the site.
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City inspection logs showed Treadaway gave contractors at the Hard Rock site the approval to pour slab on the 14th floor. Instead, GPS data from the city vehicle showed on that July day, Treadaway made a morning stop in Treme, then went to the Westbank, stopping at the University of Holy Cross, his home in Gretna and an Ochsner Clinic -- but not near the Hard Rock Hotel site.
Treadaway submitted his intent to retire from his position hours before FOX 8 aired a report on his vehicle’s GPS data.
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In December, FOX 8′s Lee Zurik interviewed a former construction worker at the Hard Rock Hotel site who described sagging floors and poles meant to support drying slab that were bent.
“I remember one weekend we went up in there and we’re working and we’re knocking the pole shores down and we could tell something was wrong," he said. "Everytime we would knock one down you’d hear another one go -- Boom! Boom! -- And so we stopped and we got a supervisor to go up there. The supervisor came up and when he came up he told us it was a – he told us to stop.
"He told us to stop because the floor had dropped like a half an inch or so.”
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The construction worker said he remembered this happened around two months before the deadly collapse, around the same period of time FOX 8 has uncovered several city inspectors may not have visited the site.
