The first tragic signals of what happened at the Jet Set disco occurred towards midnight, when plaster splashes and roof water fell on some of the hundreds of bankers, politicians, officials and former baseball players who were in the most popular disco in Santo Domingo to attend a live concert.
About 40 minutes later, in the first hour of April 8, a heavy slab collapsed and left in two a table, the last notice that something terrible was about to occur in the club that had a history of complaints about noise and on whose roof, with leaks, heavy air conditioning devices and water deposits had been installed.
Moments later, the roof collapsed with great rumble causing the death of 232 people and leaving trapped under a lot of concrete, machinery and other rubble to almost 200 more people.
The Jet Set disaster has shocked the Dominican Republic focusing attention on what, according to critics, is a flagrant national weakness: the Government does not routinely inspect the old structures of the country. At least seven other buildings, including a furniture store, a shopping center and an office building, have collapsed in recent years, with fatal results.
“God warned us, but music and party did not allow us to listen to it,” said Nelson Pimentel, 65, who was in Jet Set with friends of an elderly club. “When the first piece fell with the water, I looked up and saw what they seemed to be repairs. I dedicate myself to construction, and I can tell you: that construction seemed to be very old.”
Pimentel said that when the largest piece fell, people had about 15 seconds to run. Ten of his friends did not succeed.
The head of the Urban Infrastructure Office of Santo Domingo was one of the deceased.
According to engineers and other people who closely follow the case, government research seems to focus on the weight of the equipment installed on the ceiling. Satellite images prior to collapse show at least seven structures on the roof.
The tragedy has caused a conscientious examination by government officials, legislators and engineering experts about how it could have been avoided. In the Dominican Congress, bills are being written to impose new inspection requirements, and a court that was in poor condition was closed.
The neighbors had presented half a dozen complaints about excessive noise against the club. They and others wonder if the constant shaking of the speaker system and an external electricity generator produced so strong frequencies that they undermined a weak structure of 50 years of age to the point of causing a catastrophic failure.
They pointed out that the roof did not collapse on a day when the club was empty, but on its most popular night, suggesting some experts that the powerful vibrations of the sound and dance could have been the final catalyst that caused the collapse of the structure.
Acoustic experts claim that, although it is unlikely that excessive noise was the only cause, it could have been a contributing factor, especially in the low and forceful frequencies produced by the low speakers.
Officials of the Attorney General’s Office, armed with Sonometers, visited the club several times in recent years and a magistrate had recommended processing Jet Set, after repeated infractions, as recorded in the records.
The records show that, at least three times since 2023, the inspectors of the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources had recommended that the prosecutors of the Specialized Division in the environment take the case to the courts.
In February, the Attorney General’s Office notified the Association of Neighbors that it would proceed to prosecute the case.
But no legal action against Jet Set was undertaken, owned by an important family that also has a restaurant, a hotel in Manhattan, and 50 radio stations in the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican government has boasted to take aggressive measures against excessive noise. The Ministry of Interior and Police, in an initiative called the Peace Guarantee operation, said that in November it had confiscated more than 225 speakers of various premises.
The Jet Set speakers were not among the devices seized by the police.
The great media business led by the owner of Jet Set, Antonio Espaillat, makes it an influential figure capable of controlling public opinion, said Teodoro Tejada, former president of the Dominican College of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors.
“In this country, that means that they do not touch it with the petal of a flower,” he said.
Espaillat, in an interview issued on Wednesday in Santo Domingo, expressed regret for the many deaths, but insisted that he had no prior knowledge of any structural problem in the building.
“The first interested in knowing what was me,” he said in an interview with the day, a news program.
“To the families of the victims I want to tell you, sorry,” he added. “I’m very sorry. I would never have wanted to happen and I’m totally shattered.”
Through a spokeswoman for Jet Set and his lawyer, Espaillat declined to talk to The New York Times.
The government created a commission to investigate the collapse. The Attorney General’s Office, who had received the complaints about noise and is directing the new investigation, declined repeated requests for comments, citing the ongoing investigation.
The Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, whose technicians did the noise tests, and the Minister of Interior also declined to comment, and the mayor of Santo Domingo declined an interview application.
Jet Set opened 50 years ago and became a popular place, especially Monday nights. He moved to the current location, an old cinema located one block from the sea, about 30 years ago.
During those decades, said Espaillat in the television interview, the ceiling required constant repairs.
The ceiling panels were soaked with the water that leaked from the air conditioning and always fell, he said. The workers had replaced some on collapse, he said.
“We always had the waterproofing roof, so we always understood that it was an air issue,” he said. He stressed that he would have repaired anything that would have been necessary; After all, his mother and sister were always in the club.
Satellite images show that, at the end of 2022, a structure of about 4 by 4 meters was added to the ceiling.
“They had many things there on that roof,” said Lilian Artiles, who lives just behind the club and witnessed how they went to the roof which seemed to be a great metal structure or an air conditioner compressor.
Last year, the president of the Neighborhood Association who faced the club for complaints about the noise recorded a video of a crane raising that same object to the club’s roof.
The researchers “will have to determine if that structure was designed to withstand that additional weight,” said José Espinosa Happy, a civil engineer based in Santo Domingo, about the various roof units.
Espaillat said in the interview with the day he had no way of knowing if the roof teams were too heavy.
“I can’t tell you about the amount of weight because I never had the amount of weight,” he said.
Permits are needed for important reforms, but the government has not yet responded to a request to review permits records for the nightclub.
Several engineering experts said they believed that the overloaded roof made the old building more vulnerable to the constant rattling caused by noise.
Tejada said that a combination of vibrations of the speakers, the air conditioning devices, the generators and the people dancing probably weakened the support beams affected by the water. He also said that the photos of the rubble seem to show that several additional layers of fine concrete to the ceiling had been applied, a weight for which that structure was probably not designed.
“There comes a time that, added to the excessive burden that had, produces an explosion,” he said.
The neighbors had fought against the Jet Set since 2021, initially by an exterior generator at ground level, which said that almost all the time was used, not only during emergencies.
The authorities helped mediate in a resolution. The club agreed not to use the generator so often, to soundproof the area that surrounded it and to install a double door in the back of the club to cushion the sounds.
The mediator, named Nelson Pimentel but has no relationship with the survivor of the same name, said that at that time the roof was not inspected because it was not relevant to the complaint.
“This type of inspection is very specific,” he said.
But even after the generator’s noise was minimized and the door was installed, the club continued to violate the laws on noise, as the records show.
So far there have been at least five demands against Espaillat for the collapse, and also against the office of the mayor and the state government, claiming that they did not properly inspect the building.
Leonardo Madera Reyes, director of the National Office of Seismic Evaluation and Vulnerability of Infrastructure and Buildings, who directs the commission that tries to determine the cause of the collapse of the structure, said he had submitted a preliminary report to the Attorney General’s Office. He said he was not authorized to reveal the results, which do not include definitive conclusions.
Dozens of samples of the club’s debris material to a laboratory to evaluate aspects such as the resistance to the weight of the beams, said wood, and the results were pending.
“Have the guarantee that what comes out of there will be the real truth of the possible cause of collapse and the tremendous loss of so many human beings, loved ones we knew,” he said.
Jennifer Taveras, 24 -year -old manicurist and university student who fractured a leg in the catastrophe, told how the friend she was pointed to the roof after something fell.
She looked in that direction, but before she could run to take shelter, the wall collapsed, immobilizing both legs.
A people who was sitting at the tables in front of the dance floor died instantly, he said.
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Other people dressed in elegant clothes who had been singing, dancing and celebrating birthday parties shouted in agony and asked for help, Taveras recalled. Some shouted: “Cut the current!”, Because they were receiving electric shocks while lying injured and unable to move.
“I didn’t believe what I was living,” he said from the hospital, after the doctors operated his left leg. “I had people around me, dead people. There was a lot of blood.”