In October 2013, at the age of 35, Jaime Enrique Gómez Zapata made a decision that changed his life and that of 22 families. Faced with the imminence of what would be a tragedy, he ordered the immediate evacuation of a building that, 34 hours later, collapsed. This is his story.
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Jaime Enrique is a geologist. He knows very well the risks inherent to our geography. He has a specialization in prevention and response to natural disasters and a master’s degree in risk management and the environment. He began his career as an intern at the Medellín Municipal Disaster Prevention and Attention System (SIMPAD), which, years later, after the issuance of Law 1523 of 2012, became the Disaster Risk Management Administrative Department. (DAGRD). There he dedicated himself to visiting districts of Medellin and working on the prevention of mass movementsthe main threatening phenomenon in this mountainous area of the country.
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In 2008, after facing several emergencies due to rains -Jaime especially remembers the one in the El Socorro neighborhood, where 27 people died due to the magnitude of a landslide, as well as the tragedy in the Alto Verde urbanization, in the El Poblado neighborhood, where a landslide fell on six homes-, the capital of Antioquia declared a manifest emergency, in order to improve its response capacity in these situations, and for this it hired a team of engineers and geologists.
Jaime became a kind of mentor and taught them how to function in the field: he explained how to carry out risk inspections and what they should take into account during their visits. Thus, he soon took on a leadership role and in 2010 he became SIMPAD’s operational coordinator. Two years later he was appointed as deputy director of knowledge and risk reduction of the DAGRD, a position he held until the end of 2019.
Precisely, in that position he faced what, according to him, has been one of his greatest professional challenges to date.
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Currently, Jaime Enrique Gómez is director of the Administrative Department of Risk Management of Antioquia (DAGRAN).
The tragedy
Saturday, October 12, 2013. Tower 6 of the Space, a building located within a complex of apartments in the El Poblado neighborhood, in Medellín, collapsed around 7 at night. Tons of concrete went to the floor in a matter of minutes. At that time, Jaime was at his house, about to go out to eat with his wife and some of his friends. His phone started to ring. A wave of calls and messages confirmed what he knew the day before would happen sooner or later: Tower 6 of Space had collapsed, built six years ago by the Lérida CDO firm.
It wasn’t a hunch or a whimsical suspicion. It was the opinion of his expertise in risk management.
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Carlos Gil, the then director of the DAGRD, was on vacation and Jaime, as deputy director, took over as director in charge. That Friday morning, Jaime says, a call came to the 123 emergency line, in which “An elderly woman reported that the building had shaken, that it had sounded very hard, and that one of the walls of her apartment had cracked.”
The notice reached the office that the geologist was in charge of at the time. Jaime had a bad feeling, since it was an exclusive sector of Medellin where buildings do not usually present this type of complication. Immediately, he left the office for Space accompanied by three engineers from the mayor’s office and a team of firefighters to carry out the inspection.
This is what the building area looked like hours after the collapse, on Saturday, October 12, 2013.
Photo:John Lopez. Archive THE TIME
“We arrived at the site. We spoke with the engineers (of the construction company) and they told us that there was no risk. The representatives of the construction company said the same thing, that there was no risk. That it was a punctual damage and they were going to solve it, ”he recalls.
However, the inspection ruled out that hypothesis. “We started to do a tour of the building and we saw some dangerous conditions in the structure. For example, the building looked tilted, we saw bent windows and cracks in the walls. And there we said: ‘something is happening here’”.
Jaime remembers the exact moment when he made the decision to order the evacuation.
With the inspection teams he had arrived at an apartment on the fourth floor. From the ninth floor downwards, the deterioration was progressive in the structure and its common areas, but at that point they showed an alarming signal: “there was a column with a crack due to compression failure, that is, the column was supporting more weight than it could ”.
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The geologist narrates that image with the precision of what is recorded in memory. “A part of the column was outside, in the corridor. And the other towards the interior of the apartment, in the kitchen. We checked it and realized that it was releasing a kind of dust, which indicated that the structure was in movement”.
For that moment there was only one certainty in his head: it was urgent to evacuate the building.
And despite the fact that construction officials continued to express their disagreement, Jaime and the inspection team met with the residents and told them they had to get out of there. “At no time did I doubt the decision I made,” he says.
The residential building had 24 floors and was located in the exclusive El Poblado sector of Medellín.
Photo:John Lopez. Archive THE TIME
We checked the column and realized that it was releasing a kind of dust, which indicated that the structure was in movement
The recommendation was to evacuate tower 6 in its entirety. It was risky to be there, as there were clear signs that it could collapse. It was explained to the residents that they had to take out what was necessary and agree with the construction company on their place of stay for that night and the following ones. The community complied with the order. The versions that denied the risk of collapse, fortunately, did not persuade them.
That night, when they arrived at the building to issue the order that the authorities had issued hours earlier to the permanence to prohibit entry to the structure, the police officers realized that there was no one inside. The 22 resident families had left on time.
However, the calm was not complete.
At the time of the collapse, 12 people were in Tower 6 of Space. The rescue of their bodies ended 10 days after the tragedy. The investigation into the death of 11 of the victims (10 workers and a security guard) concluded in September 2014, after the construction company and the families reached a compensation agreement. And in the remaining case, that of a young man who was in the parking area, in 2019 the Supreme Court of Justice acquitted and ordered the release of Pablo Villegas Mesa, María Cecilia Posada Grisales and Jorge de Jesús Aristizábal Ochoa, former directors of the construction company. Lleida CDO, who had been convicted in that case.
In this regard, Jaime comments that the workers, for example, were aware of the restriction. “They were failing to comply with the recommendation that no work of any kind could be carried out until a safe plan was presented.”
On the Space lot, last October the news of the registration of the lot of almost 11,000 square meters where the building was built was knownwhich would allow it to be put up for sale and thus recover part of the money lost by those affected, who, in addition to spending years paying the bills for an uninhabited building, have reported breaches by the construction company.
(In context: Sell the lot, last hope of reparation for those affected by Space)
This is what the debris from the Space building looked like two days after the collapse.
Photo:William Bear. Archive THE TIME
A decision that saved lives
After the tragedy, the mayor of Medellín asked the Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad de los Andes to issue its opinion on this case, which was key in the subsequent process. In the opinion of the specialists of that institution, if it had been designed in compliance with all the applicable requirements of Law 400 of 1997, the structure of the building “would not have manifested the collapse it presented under the imposed conditions.”
The building did have problems of differential settlements, which were intervened in August 2013. But the structure still had notable flaws.
When he talks about this episode, Jaime’s voice fills with pride. He makes it clear, however, that he doesn’t feel like a hero or anything like that. He acknowledges that his decision saved the lives of many people, but emphasizes: “we were just doing our job”.
In fact, he says that just last year he really measured the work they did that Friday in 2013. It was in June, when the world’s news reported that a 12-story building had collapsed in Surfside, Florida (United States), in the middle of at night while its inhabitants slept, causing the death of 98 people.
For Jaime it was inevitable to think about Space. “We saved many people’s lives,” he says today, almost nine years later, remarkably moved.
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At the moment, he is director of the Administrative Department of Risk Management of Antioquia (DAGRAN), a dependency that works in that department designing strategies and programs aimed at risk reduction and disaster management. And he says he continues with the same motivation of his first day as an intern at SIMPAD, the one that also accompanied him to overcome the emergency in the Space building: to serve others.
WILLIAM MORENO HERNANDEZ
ELTIEMPO.COM journalist
On twitter: @williammoher
