The mayor of Badalona, ??Xavier Garcia Albiol, warned yesterday that the case of the evicted buildings in the Raval neighborhood of Badalona highlights a serious situation that can be applied to hundreds of homes in the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona, ??from the same period of construction and with identical types of materials used in the damaged block on Canigó Street, which is why it warns that “we are faced with a problem of significant magnitude.”
In this sense, the company that the Badalona City Council has hired to carry out in-depth inspections of the blocks located in the block between Canigó, Àusias March and Llefià streets, intervened in the investigation of the collapse of a block in the Turó de la Peira in Barcelona on November 11, 1990, in which one person died and several were seriously injured. Until 2004, a total of 11 blocks with 142 buildings were completely rehabilitated and demolished. In their place, 54 buildings were rebuilt.
Although the cause of the dramatic accident in Barcelona was due to aluminosis, in Badalona this is not the case. However, both Mayor Albiol and the Councilor for Territory and Sustainability, Daniel Gracia, warn that both cases have a certain similarity because the buildings were of the same typology, built at the end of the 1950s. iron crisis” that reduced this material to a minimum in construction, with elements widely used at the time such as ceramic material. Precisely, the state of the ceramic materials, which are obtained with fired clay, such as bricks, tiles, floors and coverings, very common in works from the mid-20th century, are those that are analyzed in detail by specialist technicians.
Under these premises, the mayor of Badalona suggests the need to rethink mandatory inspections. In this sense, it stands out that the building at 9 Canigó Street, which collapsed on February 6, causing three fatalities, three neighbors who at that time were at the point where it partially collapsed, had received the “fit” certificate after passing the mandatory Technical Building Inspection (ITE). These types of inspections are visual and, in the case of Badalona, ??only 12 of the homes were carried out, so he could not detect the most serious pathologies that are often hidden under false ceilings. For this reason, Badalona court number 1 keeps the investigation open with forensic experts to resolve the causes of the sinking.
The technicians hired by the City Council will analyze in detail the floors that the Generalitat Firefighters have previously shored up to prevent any landslides. At the moment, they are focusing on block number 5, which along with 7 and 11 have also been evacuated to study in more depth if any internal structure, such as party walls, have been modified. In another line of research, they focus on the quality of the materials used and possible overweight on the roofs when fitting out warehouses and rooms, or the construction of chimneys. A whole series of factors that are incorporated into the investigation.
Albiol assured yesterday that “the ITE “can be used for relatively new buildings, 10 or 15 years old, but not in homes from 70 years ago” where it is key to carry out an in-depth analysis of the structural elements.