Two days before the Ospinal family's house collapsed, construction had begun on the adjacent plot. An excavator from the company Franluca, hired by the developer Promofuerte Gestión S.L., was digging into the ground, which could have motivated the collapse. "I have my doubts that this is the reason" explains the secretary of the Official College of Quantity Surveyors and Technical Architects of Lanzarote, Penélope Tabares, against the first version given by the capital's City Council, which pointed to the excavation as a possible cause of the event.
That house was built more than ten years ago and like many other houses in Arrecife, "probably did not pass any technical control and even had dampness on one side". The architect explains that in a case like this, it is necessary to check if the house had its construction license or if it is one of the "self-construction" houses that the owners make "on weekends". The structure of the house could also have been damaged by the realization of extension works and reforms inside that "touched the little structure that the house had".
All these factors could have made "the house vulnerable", explains Penélope Tabares, not only to the adjacent earth movements, which in this case "in principle did not touch the house that has fallen", but also to the weight of the building itself. "The logical thing is that in this type of structures once the building fails, a part is defeated, not the entire building. So the structure was already deficient because it has collapsed entirely" interprets Penélope Tabares, who recognizes that "everything is conjecture until an investigation is done", which will presumably be commissioned by the insurance companies of the construction company and the house, if the owner had it contracted.
Houses that escape control
According to the secretary of the Official College of Quantity Surveyors and Technical Architects of Lanzarote, in Arrecife there are many houses built without a license and that have also been extended and modified later without a approved project. An area in which these constructions proliferate is the Argana Alta neighborhood. Many of them have a sanctioning file, but if the administration does not act and demolish the house within the period it has, "those houses remain in legal protection".
On the other hand, Arrecife does not have a specific technical inspection regulation for buildings. There is a generic Law for the entire national territory that each Autonomous Community acquires as its own and whose competence is transferred to the municipalities and these are the ones in charge of making a specific regulation, which in reality, very few municipalities have. "Madrid, Barcelona and Santa Cruz de Tenerife have it, they have technical personnel" points out the architect, who explains this regulation as "the MOT of the buildings". A control that buildings of a certain age must pass, although, the house that collapsed in San Francisco Javier "would not fall within this review because it does not reach the necessary age.
Back to the fight
Arbey Ospinal calculates the economic losses at about 35,000 euros between new furniture that he had acquired for the house in which they had been living for a few days, machinery located in the garage to set up his own bakery, cash and jewelry. But what worries him most are "my papers and those of my family", which allowed him to work in Spain legally and which have been left among the rubble.
"I hope the mayor helps us recover them". For the moment, the City Council has housed the family in the Hotel Lancelot and is waiting to provide them with a new home. From the company that was carrying out the excavations of the adjacent construction, they declared to La Voz that "the responsibility should fall on the developer of the project". Meanwhile, the Ospinal family is preparing to start from scratch, although "demoralized, after so many years of sacrifice and struggle away from our people?but well, it is part of life and we have to face it as it comes".
