Repairs will close village parking lot

Repairs will close village parking lot

SPENCERPORT - Repairs to a Spencerport village parking lot damaged by a movie crew in December will begin on August 26. The repairs to the municipal parking lot at West Avenue and Church Street will be a two phase project and will cause intermittent closure of the lot for about three days, Village of Spencerport's Deputy Mayor Ted Rauber said.

"When the poles snapped and the transformers came down (during the course of the movie filming) the blacktop was damaged," he said. "It's going to cost about $10,000 to repair."

The money for the repairs is coming out of the village budget because the village is still negotiating an insurance settlement with the movie filming company. "We expect to be reimbursed out of the film company's insurance," Rauber said.

The August 26 work will take one day to mill down the broken asphalt, following that the village will work to get blacktop from the plant. "Putting down the blacktop will cause a two day closure of the parking lot while we spend one day paving and the next day striping the lot," he said.

The production company had filed a certificate of insurance with the village and village officials expect that insurance will cover the entire cost of the repairs needed due to the accident.

History

It was on Saturday, December 16, 2006 that a movie crew came to the village to film scenes for a movie, "Alphabet Killer," an independent feature loosely based on the 1970s unsolved murders of three Rochester area girls whose first and last names began with the same initials.

One village business on Union Street was transformed into a grocery store where scenes were shot throughout the day. When the day's filming downtown was over, the cameras and actors were on the move to a home on West Avenue when a production company truck traveling across the parking lot located behind businesses on the west side of Union Street caught a utility wire. The snag subsequently caused the snap of two utility poles at the base and the dislodging of one of five transformers attached to the poles.

Oil spilling from the transformers was set afire by sparks from the electrical wires, igniting a car fire in a vehicle owned by a member of the production company which was parked in the lot.

Once the power was cut to the main feed servicing the parking lot area, responders from Spencerport Fire Department contained the car fire, but the vehicle as well as camera equipment and material belonging to the company were destroyed in the blaze. Siding on the east side of the Village Square apartment complex was curled and melted from the heat and the fire, but no damage was sustained to businesses located on that side of the building.

Power outages occurred in the West Avenue, Church Street, Amity Street areas that lasted about an hour, but it was Sunday afternoon before electrical service was restored to the Spencerport Post Office.