The power is back on at the Logan Valley Mall in Altoona, following an outage in one third of the mall that lasted for more than a month, but, mall workers say the power outage shined a light on ongoing issues.
The power first went out on Friday, June 26, although mall owners did not notify the public until days later on June 30. The power was restored on Friday, July 31.
Jamie Powers is an assistant manager at Joseph Jacob Jewelers, one of the stores that had to close because of the power outage. He estimates his and other businesses lost a combined $1 million in sales.
“We had customers calling us, begging us for their jewelry repairs and people wanting to get engagement rings, and I couldn’t help them. I felt horrible," Powers said.
Powers said he couldn’t even get into his store because it has an electronic gate. Other stores without power said they couldn’t process payments because there was no WiFi. One store lost rare fish.
Powers said he’s filed a lawsuit against the mall’s owners to try to get out of his lease early, which ends in May next year. Powers said he filed that lawsuit about a year and a half ago, before the power outage.
He said people with mobility issues have a hard time getting to his store on the second floor.
“We only have one up working escalator," Powers said. "The other five up or down escalators are not working. And we have an up and down escalator that, when we get to October, will be three years since it’s worked.”
Powers said there’s an elevator that hasn’t worked for about eight months. There’s also limited access to the top floor of the parking garage.
“You can’t get to the top deck from the Macy’s, where the Macy’s used to be before they closed, to the top deck because the cement is falling down," Powers said.
Powers said there isn’t a lot of communication from mall management. He’s tried to take matters into his own hands. Powers said he’s reached out to Logan Township officials, the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
He’s reported mice, mold and water damage throughout the mall. But, he said, nothing has improved.
Several other workers talked with WPSU and shared similar concerns about health, safety and economic impacts. Most did not want to share their names out of fear of retaliation.
Issues with the parking garage, the prolonged power outage and a gnat infestation in parts of the building are some of the reasons one former employee says she recently quit.
“I was tired of going home itching every day because of a thousand gnats and worrying if my car was still going to be standing, or if the parking garage was going to collapse," said Oswald, a former employee who shared only her last name in fear of legal retaliation.
Oswald, and other employees who spoke with WPSU, said there was a burning chemical smell throughout the mall on the day the power first went out.
“The fire department was called, and you could walk through that entire mall and smell, you know that, like electrical burning smell, that burning plastic almost, you could smell it throughout the entire mall," Oswald said.
Oswald says some businesses evacuated the building, but her store wasn’t one of them. She said she wishes mall management had evacuated the whole building for safety.
Firefighters later told workers the cause was a blown transformer – that took more than a month to be replaced. A FirstEnergy spokesperson said there was no issue on their end and that the mall’s owners are responsible for its transformers.
Oswald said the more than month-long power outage made other ongoing problems at the mall impossible to ignore.
“This is the straw that broke the camel’s back," Oswald said. "Everything else was little issues. You know, gnat infestation, whatever. It happens sometimes. The water leaks, whatever. Maybe they’ll get around to fixing them. But you let burning plastic go on and let businesses shut down for over a month, it is very clear you don’t care about the public.”
Mall owners did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Oswald acknowledges malls on the whole are on the decline, but not all of them are in disrepair like the Logan Valley Mall.
“I think we as a community need to maybe see about trying to get our mall back," Oswald said. "And if we can’t rebuild it into a mall, rebuild it into something that’s actually going to serve purpose to the community and not just be an eyesore.”
The Namdar Realty Group, based in New York, owns and operates the Altoona mall and more than a thousand other properties across the country. That includes the Nittany Mall near State College.
A Centre County judge recently ordered Namdar to pay almost $130,000 to College Township to repair sinkholes outside that mall. Township supervisors say there was a lack of communication then, too.
Namdar had said they were going to repair the sink holes, but didn’t say when and left them unaddressed for months. So the township hired its own contractor and billed the mall’s owners.
