There is no record in the La Vega town hall archives indicating that the company Multimuebles requested permission to remodel the collapsed building, which collapsed last week causing the death of a young woman and leaving several employees traumatized.
Maria Arielina Hernandez, 40, is one of those rescued from the rubble and according to her husband, she was to undergo surgery yesterday, after presenting fractures in her dorsal spine.
The Director of Urban Planning for the Municipal Council of La Vega, Félix Matías, assured that there is no record in the council's archives of any application for a remodeling permit for the R&S Multimuebles infrastructure.
Matías explained that the only registered documentation consists of the certifications issued by the La Vega Fire Department and the Central Directorate of Investigations of the National Police (Dicrim), in relation to the fire that affected the building in March 2019.
“We have no record of any request to remodel that building in our files,” Félix Matías told the Listín Diario newspaper.
Matías added that when contacting the owners of the structure, they mentioned that they were in "the process of changing the old windows because it was an old building," and they indicated that to carry out this change, they understood that they did not require any type of accreditation.
A team of technicians began clearing the rubble of the building yesterday, Monday. They explained that they are seeking to evaluate and analyze the concrete used in the construction, and other variables, to determine the causes of the collapse.
The president of CODIA, the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors, told El Inmobiliario today that when he visited the site of the events, “we could see that the structure was overloaded on the roof, it had a thin layer of about 17 centimeters on top of a weak metal slab and on top of that it had a solar panel system, meaning that the roof was completely overloaded.”.
Also present at yesterday's commission were the National Office for Seismic Evaluation and Vulnerability of Infrastructure and Buildings (Onesvie), the Dominican Society of Structural Engineers (Sinedom), and the Ministry of Public Works and Communications (MOCP).
