“The number of deficiencies in the building are so numerous that we have cited the need for the owner to make a complete engineering assessment of the entire building,” Farrar writes in an e-mail to Style. “In [the building inspector’s] opinion, the structural problems are related to the age of the building, the footings under the building, damage from Gaston, the lack of maintenance and other factors.”

It’s unclear whether the building violations were connected to the two-alarm fire, which damaged a quarter of the building, with the most severe damage to the south side of the warehouse complex just east of Main Street Station. Fire officials are still investigating the cause of the fire.

“It’s all being addressed right now,” Loving’s spokesman Mike Royster says of the reported building-code violations. He points out that the company was up and running just seven days after last year’s flood and, recently, just four days after the fire. Loving’s is temporarily operating out of the ACME Tomato warehouse, a building the Loving family owns across the street.

What’s more, in the aftermath of Gaston, the produce company, like other storm-affected businesses, had to meet with compliance regulations in order to reopen.

In the meantime, city officials have allowed the owners to re-enter the building to dispose of produce inventory and to restore power to the northern end of the property. — Brandon Walters and Scott Bass

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