Qualla: Algo Centre Mall

Algo Centre Mall: Introduction

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 2.5. Doloris Perizzolo was opening pull-tab lottery tickets at the booth inside the Algo Centre Mall when the ceiling above her gave way. It was 2:20 in the afternoon on Saturday, June 23, 2012. A section of the rooftop parking deck -- roughly 12 metres by 24 metres of concrete and steel -- collapsed through two floors of the shopping centre in Elliot Lake, Ontario, killing Perizzolo, 74, and Lucie Aylwin, a 37-year-old employment consultant at College Boreal. More than twenty others were injured. The collapse itself took seconds. The failures that caused it had been accumulating for decades.

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 2.5

Algo Centre Mall: A Parking Lot in the Sky

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Algo Centre Mall opened in 1980 in Elliot Lake, a small Northern Ontario city that had grown up around uranium mining. The mall was more than a shopping centre -- it housed a grocery store, a hotel, a library, government offices, and dozens of retail tenants. For a remote com...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Algo Centre Mall: Warnings Buried, Reports Doctored

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The leaks were not a secret. Water dripped through the mall ceiling so persistently that tenants complained for years. But the building's owners, the Nazarian family, treated the problem as a nuisance rather than a structural emergency. The public inquiry that followed the collap...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Algo Centre Mall: Four Days in the Rubble

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The rescue effort became its own crisis. Local authorities alerted the Commissioner of Community Safety by 4:00 that afternoon, and Toronto's Heavy Urban Search and Rescue team arrived at 4:25 the next morning after a 540-kilometre drive. They began probing the rubble immediately...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Algo Centre Mall: A Town Remade

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P199, CC BY-SA 3.0. The loss of the Algo Centre Mall tore a hole in Elliot Lake that went far beyond the physical crater. An estimated 250 people had worked in the mall or its attached hotel. The grocery store, the library, a Scotiabank branch, Service Canada offices, a pharmacy -- all were gone ove...

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Image: P199 | CC BY-SA 3.0