Two men working to lift a house onto a higher foundation after being flooded by Hurricane Harvey have died when the house fell on them.
The accident happened just after 11am Thursday when the jacks being used to lift the house collapsed in a suburban Houston subdivision, Harris County emergency officials say.
The area that the house was in, on Olana Drive near Bush Intercontinental Airport, was flooded waist-deep during Harvey, neighbors said.
‘They were lifting the house and the house collapsed,’ Roxana Lee, a family member of the homeowner, told KHOU.
‘They were volunteering, they were just trying to do a good deed from Hurricane Harvey. It’s pretty much a good deed gone bad,’ Lee said.
Two men working to lift a house onto a higher foundation after being flooded by Hurricane Harvey have died when the house (pictured) fell on them
She said the homeowner wanted to raise the house up to prevent it from flooding again in future storms.
Amanda Guthrie, a sister-in-law of one of the victims, two workers were underneath the house while two others were working outside when it collapsed, ABC 13 reported.
The house, a wood-frame structure built in 1940, dropped at least three feet onto the two men, crushing them.
Emergency crews had to use special equipment including air bags and a hydraulic tool to lift the house off the men and retrieve the bodies, Assistant Chief Al Sterkx of the Harris County Emergency Services District 10 said.
The identities of the dead men have not yet been released.
The accident happened just after 11am Thursday when the jacks being used to lift the house collapsed in a suburban Houston subdivision
Fire officials at the scene declined to speculate on whether the work being done on the house was an amateur job.
The Harris County Fire Marshal’s Office is leading the investigation into the incident.
A county spokeswoman said that no permit to raise the home had been issued, theHouston Chronicle reported.
The county did issue a permit in November for residential flood recovery, but the spokeswoman said that permit, which allows a homeowner to restore a home to its pre-flood condition, does not authorize raising the structure.
Home elevation projects must be permitted and go through the city’s structural inspection department, Alanna Reed, a spokeswoman with the public works department, told the newspaper.
‘We discourage people from trying to elevate their own homes,’ she said.