AUGUSTA — Aiden Oliveira and his Monmouth Academy boys basketball teammates were inside an Augusta Civic Center locker room Saturday preparing to play a state championship game when they heard a loud crash.

When Oliveira, a senior, turned around, he saw a pile of cinder blocks and rubble on the floor.

A non-load-bearing wall, which was between the shower area and a small alleyway, had collapsed, bringing down part of the ceiling.

“Everyone kind of just stopped for a second, and we were like, ‘What just happened?’” Oliveira said. “I mean, the wall just literally fell down. It was kind of a heart-stopping moment — we had to make sure everything was all good.”

No one was seriously injured in the incident. Josh Iwuanyanwu, who was stretching against the wall when the ceiling opened up, suffered only minor scrapes to the hip.

Following the collapse, tournament directors ushered Monmouth players into a conference room on the upper level of the building before being moved again, this time to an officials’ locker room.

Senior Rory Foyt and coach Wade Morrill were standing directly outside the locker room door when the collapse took place. When the two heard the noise and went inside, they couldn’t believe their eyes.

“I thought maybe my guys (had been) screwing around — I didn’t know what had gone on — but when I went inside, I was like, ‘There’s no way; there’s no amount of anything my guys could have done to mess that up,'” Morrill said.

“I had gone out to check the score and time (of the game going on), and I heard a huge bang,” Foyt said. “We went in, and (my teammates) all started screaming, and then we ran back out of there.”

Augusta Director of Code Enforcement Robert Overton said the collapse “should not have occurred with a concrete wall.”

The wall, he said, consisted of blocks stacked on top of the floor and into the ceiling, with mortar poured in between. Crucially, builders did not reinforce the wall with metal — a standard practice today.

“We’re in a very different building code than we were, you know, 50-something years ago,” Overton said.

Overton said he would seriously question this design if it were proposed for a new building. But the Augusta Civic Center was built in the early 1970s. Stewart and Williams Construction Co. used designs from Bunker & Savage Architects and erected the $3 million building in about a year.

The building has significantly deteriorated since. A leaky roof, aging electrical systems and HVAC systems prompted conversation at the City Council level in 2024 about fully refurbishing the building.

The price tag to do so: at least $33 million.

Augusta voters have approved two recent bonds to repair the aging building — for the roof in 2022 and for other improvements last year. Over the next five years, $18 million in work is in the cards.

No maintenance or structural complaints are on file for the wall, a Civic Center report on the incident said. No official cause has been determined, either.

The city hired a structural engineer from Harriman to survey the Civic Center next week and determine if other concrete walls were built the same way, Overton said.

Overton noticed “minor cracking” in other concrete walls during his personal walk-through of the building after Saturday’s collapse. He said he won’t know more about the walls’ condition — or the repair cost — until an engineer examines them.

Maine Principals’ Association Executive Director Mike Burnham said the MPA has not previously received complaints about the Civic Center’s condition. He added that the state’s high school sports governing body “has all the confidence in the world” in the venue going forward.