Fred Harteis Sports News - An engineer said he had limited involvement with the Dallas Cowboys' training facility that collapsed during a thunderstorm and left a team employee paralyzed.
"I was there just a few months," said Enrique Tabak in a story published online by The Dallas Morning News. "They brought me in to build little farm buildings — sheds, agricultural applications."
Tabak formerly worked for the company — Summit Structures LLC of Allentown, Pa. — that the Cowboys hired in 2003 to build the indoor practice facility. He was listed as the engineer responsible for its design and that of a Philadelphia building that collapsed earlier that same year. A Pennsylvania court ruled in 2006 that Summit was negligent in the design and construction of the membrane-covered building.
Tabak is now employed by a different company in Canada.
Summit is a subsidiary of a Canadian firm called Cover-All Building Systems. Both of the collapses involved a Summit specialty: large buildings with lightweight steel frames, over which fabric is tightly wrapped. Cover-All previously was known primarily for building smaller agricultural buildings in that style.
Cowboys' spokesman Rich Dalrymple would not say Tuesday whether the team knew about the Philadelphia collapse when it hired Summit. He said his response to all questions related to the company would be a "blanket no comment."
Records obtained by The Associated Press show the city of Irving granted the Cowboys' request to replace the fabric roof last year, five years after the structure was built. The team listed itself as the contractor for the roof replacement.
Gary Miller, Irving's director of planning and inspections, has said the records do not show the Cowboys sought an inspection of the facility after replacing the roof, although city code requires it.
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