The collapse of the Caballito PH was
a tragedy foretold.
A few hours before the house collapsed, a neighbor had alerted Ramón Acuña (75) about a significant crack that
split a part of her apartment in two
.
After a “reassuring” call with the construction manager, a few minutes later everything ended with the death of the man and his sister, Nélida Acuña (81).
Ingrid Vadala went out that morning to shop at the supermarket just before it started to rain.
Her unit is at the back of the PH and to go out to the street she had to go through a hallway from which
you could see part of the Acuña brothers' apartment.
When she passed through the hallway, she looked at that part of Ramón's house and, surprised, began to
alert the neighbors of the complex through the WhatsApp group.
“When I come out I see that Ramón's part of the house had a crack.
I send him to the group 'Ramón, have you seen this crack?'
and he replied 'no'.
There he begins to get distressed, he told us that he was already tired of this situation because everything was cracked and he also had
a water leak,"
Ingrid's story began.
While they were talking, the neighbor proposed to Ramón two ways to find a solution.
The first was that she was going to help him
make the complaint on the City Government website
or give him the number of the construction manager so that he could tell her the situation himself.
Video
The audio that Ramón Acuña sent to the head of the work minutes before the tragedy
Around 11:20, the 75-year-old man answered the neighborhood group again and said that he had already had a telephone conversation with the architect.
In the audio, which
Clarín
was able to access, Ramón said: "Ingrid, I already spoke with Santiago (the construction manager). I sent him a WhatsApp and he called me, I told him who I was, I told him what was happening and he said 'yes.' You have photos of that, send me that I'll put it in a folder and say 14 and I'll send it to the company, like I have the others.'”
“(The construction manager) told me 'yes yes yes, rest assured that everything will be solved... we are in communication.
So nothing, he's already there, at least sent there, and he told me that he'll let me know if there's anything.
Thank you for taking care of yourself my love, thank you dear
,” he said to Ingrid.
Around 12:48 it started to pour.
“At 12:30 I picked up my mother for a health check.
“My uncle was about to help my mother go down the stairs because we needed to do everything as quickly as possible,” recalled Silvia, Nélida’s daughter.
“They didn't come to that.
I was talking to my mother and I heard her say 'there was an explosion' and she went to look for him, I don't know how far and she told my uncle 'the wall is opening, the wall is opening'.
He left the phone open and passed by,”
he added.
The beginning of the cracks
According to neighbors, the demolition of what was previously a clinic had begun on November 29, 2022.
“From there our chaos began,” Vadala warned, and assured that his department
“was the first to start harming the work,” he remarked.
The cracks were in walls and hallways of the property next to the construction site that caused the tragedy.
“A year and a half ago I had initiated legal action.
My house is at the bottom of the PH and is adjacent to the construction site, so when the demolition begins they start to break it all up.
The ceilings cracked, my glass roof was broken and humidity began to enter.
As a result of all this
I had to hire lawyers paid out of my pocket
,” she said.
The neighbor warned that the problem was getting worse in November of last year when they began to see that in the hallway, where the gas and water pipes pass, there were
“significant cracks.”
The tiles in the hallway broken by the vibrations of the construction site next to the PH.
“Because they knew that I had everything prosecuted, they made a formwork on the wall of my house and then they started digging six meters down.
Beyond that,
the wall of my house began to separate from the floor
.
After a while, they ran the workshop and began to work in front of where Ramón's house was.
This was avoided with the same work they did behind the wall of my house,” he explained.
Four weeks before the collapse, the construction company had notified the owners about a water leak that led to the construction site.
As a consortium, they had hired a company to see the state of the pipes, and determined that, as a result of the work, there was
a displacement
caused by the movement of the earth itself.
At the same time, Nélida and Ramón's house began to leak water from its roof.
Silvia, Neli's daughter, remarked that the neighbors never agreed with the neighboring work.
“My family has lived here for 50 years, they are old houses, but with stories.
This company, when it arrived in the neighborhood, offered my mother to sell her apartment and move.
They came to profit from
a construction that was not previously allowed in Caballito
.
Now they killed my family and in the most cruel way
,” she remarked.
This is how the marble floor of Ramón and Nélida Acuña's apartment looked like after the collapse
"I know that in this country there is no justice, that they are not going to go to prison, but I want that construction company to stop doing anything and not continue killing people," the woman emphasized, adding:
"Our pain is unbearable, no one in the country Government has approached us.
In one year we never saw a brick, it was all excavation.
We want a renowned lawyer, because this was an apathy on the part of Judge Font and Qubo constructions and businesses.”
S.C.