WILTON – Crash, boom, bang!

Cindy Doyon was chatting with a customer inside her Depot Street laundry business Thursday morning when she heard something odd coming from outside.

“I heard this rumble, and I’m waiting for a truck to go by. There wasn’t no truck.”

She peeked her head out the door of CMD Laundromat and looked across the street. Where once had been a green-and-yellow, two-story apartment building, there was now a one-story wreck. “Dust was still flying around out there,” she remembered.

The building – which had been in a state of near-abandonment since Doyon can remember – had collapsed.

No one’s really sure why.

“I have no idea – age and condition?” said Paul Montague, Wilton’s code enforcement officer. “I think it was going to happen no matter what,” he said.

“It’s probably less of a danger now than it was before,” he said. “We’re fortunate it didn’t fall in the road.”

Good thing it fell when it did, Doyon said. “I’m glad it’s a school day. Oh, man – high school and middle school kids like to sit there,” she said. Kids often waited for the bus on the buildings now-splintered steps, or sat there to have a cigarette.

As of late Thursday, town officials had yet to locate the building’s owner.