What happens when your car is stuck for months? Empire Towers owners offer few answers.

Dave Smoot had one last meeting at Empire Towers on July 9, when the building began to crumble.

He had parked his car on the second level of the garage. Smoot, a pharmaceutical sales representative, visited the towers at 7310 Ritchie Highway every third week of the month or so to meet with businesses considered part of his sales territory, he said.

Two months later, Smoot’s car remains in the garage, along with around 90 other vehicles trapped beneath the towers.

On July 9 around 2:30 p.m, the Anne Arundel Fire Department evacuated Empire Towers over “structural integrity issues.” Officials set up a 150-foot perimeter around the building, one of the tallest in Anne Arundel County, to protect people from a potential collapse.

County officials expected it would take 10 days to stabilize the building, but as of September, a timeline for people to retrieve their vehicles and reenter the building remains unclear.

“Some of us were just customers there or serving customers,” Smoot said in a Sept. 4 phone call. “We don’t know when it’s going to end.”

He and dozens of others say they’re frustrated over the lack of communication from the county and the building owner following the incident, which has meant added transportation expenses and being stuck in limbo.

The building owner, Daljit Sawhney, did not respond to requests for comment. The building’s property manager, Ravinder Sawhney, who works with Active Property Management, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Tanner Halleran, a spokesperson for the Anne Arundel County Office of the County Executive, said the county has reached out to the building owner to ask for updates on its plans and a timeline for vehicle retrieval. The office shares updates at aacounty.org/empiretowers only as the building’s owner and management companies provide them.

Phase 2 of construction is projected to last until the end of September, though that may change, Halleran said. He added that no one will be allowed within the safety perimeter until the owner proves the building is structurally sound with a certificate from an engineer.

A July 10 county inspector’s report revealed construction workers renovating the parking garage cut sections of concrete from the floor and the base of support columns, including tension ties and steel rebar, causing the first level to collapse several feet.

Daljit Sawhney did not have a permit to conduct the work, making it his second violation for an unpermitted contract job in the last decade. The previous violation occurred in 2016 over unpermitted mechanical work on the building and was resolved after four months, according to county permit records.

Sawhney also failed to have self-closing fire doors in the tower’s stairwell with permits on display, according to a May 2016 code enforcement litigation report.

Preeti Emrick, who directs the county’s Office of Emergency Management, said she expected the remediation work to begin the week of July 14. The county issued Sawhney’s company, Sawhney Commercial LLC, a permit to begin shoring up the garage two days later. A deadline for the construction to be finished was set for Aug. 31, according to an email sent by Department of Inspections and Permits Assistant Director Andrew McCarra on July 27.

It was unclear at the time when the building would reopen. The email also requested the building owner say whether it planned “to repair or demolish the structure.”

On July 29, the Maryland Insurance Administration, which advocates for consumers and regulates insurers, started an investigation into the issue with the Cincinnati Insurance Cos. — the building’s insurer — after receiving numerous complaints from Empire Towers tenants and their employees regarding access to their cars.

“We thought we’d be able to get our vehicles the following week,” said Niaka Reed, 40, a paralegal at the Law Office of Mitchell A. Greenberg in Empire Towers. Reed’s Subaru remains trapped on the garage’s first level.

Reed commutes about half an hour each way to her job from Fort George G. Meade and has two kids in different schools. She described it as “almost impossible” for her family to function with one car. Her husband needs the other vehicle to work, and there’s no public transportation for Reed to take outside the military base.

The vehicle carries sentimental value: a chunk of coral reef from when her husband was stationed at a Hawaii military base in the glove compartment, diving gear that belonged to her aunt — an amputee and breast cancer survivor — in the trunk and prayer beads, which have long hung from her rearview mirror.

By the end of July, the building owners had disbursed stipends of up to $3,000 to Reed and others who had their cars in the garage to ameliorate the temporary transportation costs. Emails to tenants from Active Property Management in mid-August revealed the cars could be removed in 90 days, while a second email around the same time indicated there was no timeline.

Reed said it felt like the stipend was “instantaneously gone.” She paid her boss back $645 for helping her afford a five-day car rental. Including a deal for $31 per day, she paid $1,700 for the first month without her vehicle. Then Reed paid another $1,600 for August.

“On Sept. 14, I’ll have to figure out what to do for another month,” she said, explaining that insurance won’t cover the costs because the insurer doesn’t know if her trapped car is damaged.

Victoria Vance, who works as a legal assistant for the David Ruben Law Firm in the towers, said she also has received little help from insurers. Vance struggled to verify that her car was still trapped on the garage’s second floor. Once she could prove its location to her insurer, the company paid her $200 and labeled the incident as a collision, which also raised her insurance rate.

“I was emotionally drained,” she said, explaining that the payout and her stipend ran out relatively quickly, because she needed a rental car large enough to fit her four kids and husband.

“There’s no new shoes or clothes shopping for this school year,” she said.

In the last few weeks she has purchased a car, expecting her old vehicle to have suffered irreparable damage or to disappear with the rest. The “slim to no communication” from the owners and the county has left Vance and her family in limbo.

“The more they’re not communicating, the more suspicious I get,” David Ruben, Vance’s boss, said of the building owners.

He said he has purchased cars and paid for employees’ rental cars to help. But he’s no longer waiting for answers.

“I don’t expect to get anything out of there in the condition that it was,” he said, adding that his computer servers are fried now that the building’s power has been cut for more than a month as construction continues.

He’s signed a 12-month lease for a new space in Linthicum and is working with an attorney to end a 10-year lease with Empire Towers that began in February, amid renovations that doubled the size of the space and cost “a lot of money,” he said.

“I don’t think I would feel safe going back into the building,” he said. “I don’t expect to go back.”