Botanical Garden to reopen Monday morning

The Atlanta Botanical Garden will open Monday for the first time since Friday’s fatal construction accident.

Garden Executive Director Mary Pat Matheson will officially reopen the garden at 9 a.m. after speaking to the media about a charitable fund created to help the victims of the accident.

Inspectors from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration also return to the garden to find out what caused part of an elevated walkway to collapse.

The collapse killed one construction worker, Angel Chupin, 66, and sent 18 others to the hospital. Ten workers were still hospitalized Sunday, including six in intensive care at Grady Memorial Hopsital, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Chupin’s employer, SDC Concrete, is a small Kennesaw firm working on the botanical garden project as a subcontractor. Company president Charles Naser said Sunday that not all of the injured workers were his employees, but wouldn’t give a number.

Naser said the fund for the injured workers and their families will be called the Joquil Fund and will operate through Wachovia Bank. He SDC, general contractor Hardin Construction and the botanical garden will set up the account.

“These families are all very frightened, very scared about what’s going to happen to them,” Naser said. “We’re not a large company. This is just devastating.”

The Canopy Walk is part of a $55 million makeover at the Piedmont Road botanical garden. Billed as the “longest pathway of its kind in the country,” the 600-foot-long walkway will rise to 45 feet, allowing walkers a view of the treetops in the forest next to Midtown’s Piedmont Park.

Friday was supposed to be a milestone for the project. The garden had invited the media to attend the first pouring of concrete that morning. The pouring had just begun when a portion of the walkway collapsed.

Hardin Construction is also putting up a new parking building and a visitor center in addition to the walkway.

“We will not be doing any construction on Monday of any kind,” Hardin spokeswoman Barkley Russell said Sunday.

Russell said no one knows how long OSHA will stay on the accident site. “They have six months to file a report and that’s the best we can tell you.”

Hardin will bring in an independent inspection team after OSHA is finished and the company is allowed on to the accident site.

Usually open weekends, the garden closed Saturday and Sunday, garden spokesman Danny Flanders said.

He said the garden will reopen Monday and has several holiday activities already planned, including a botanical St. Nick and a holiday high tea.

The garden is reserving proceeds from now until the end of the year to help families of the accident victims.