[News] Where to live? The uncertain future after the sinkhole in Concón

[FNX Magokiler]

Four men rest leaning against the back of a truck. Sudan. The door is open. Inside there are boxes, chairs and the cushions of an armchair. The group is taking down, by hand, the furniture from an apartment on the 26th floor of tower A of the Miramar Reñaca building, which, along with tower B, the Kandinsky and Santorini Norte, were evacuated due to its proximity to the two sinkholes registered in the dunes of Viña del Mar in recent weeks.

Meanwhile, a woman approaches them to ask for a hammer. She looks distressed. “With all the hustle and bustle I lost the keys to a drawer and now I have no way to open it.” Her name is Trinidad Carreño and she is 70 years old and until early Monday morning she had lived for the last 13 years, since 2010, in tower B of the same building.

“This has been like a bombshell for me. They threw a bomb at me and what I had achieved with a lot of effort disappeared,” she sadly tells La Tercera.

The night of the accident, the owner says, the first thing she felt was a lot of noise. “I looked out on the balcony and saw a river of water coming out, a giant river. On the street there were police officers and workers in orange overalls. Suddenly they ran to the south of the street, which was closed. And well, that's where the sinkhole began. I saw that a light pole began to sink and in a matter of seconds everything fell. Then I and my granddaughter, and my daughter and my grandson, who lived in another apartment in the building, started to go down. There was a gas leak and the air was unbreathable. Below, police had already ordered the evacuation. It was one in the morning. We went out with pajamas, a jacket and we started. From the gas pump he called a daughter who lives in Olmué, and another son who lives in Viña. But at that time no one answered. Until my daughter called back around 04:00, and she told me to go immediately to her house,” she extends.

Since then, Trinidad, her daughter and her two grandchildren have been living with relatives in Olmué. The fact of being “bothering my age,” she says, “has been terrible.”

 

 

The worst thing, she adds, is that she perceives that the Ministry of Public Works (MOP), with the mitigation work she is doing, “is laughing at people. I feel that way because you would have seen the work, they threw some nylon towards the dune and made a wooden railing for it. Logically, that was not going to hold up.”

Then I heard a statement from the Minister of Public Works (Jessica López) that, really, if she had been there she would have told him if she would like this to have happened to her. At this age, being homeless and laughing at people, and saying that the job was done well... is a mockery. And what's more, she says that it was in record time. I understand things the other way around. “In record time we left the broom.”

In the street next to the sinkholes (Costa Montemar) you can see that there are men working. They build screens with wood around a water chamber. Trinidad assures that they are dumping, with a pump, the waters that were directed by the collapsed collector - which caused the first landslide - towards other chambers. And in addition, “they are throwing fill debris into the sinkhole, and I really don't know what function that will serve. I don't know if that's what should really be done, because the work they did before was a trivial task, a ridiculous thing that, without me being an expert, you realized that it was going to collapse and everything go into the void."

Nicolás Marchant, son of Alfredo Marchant (72), owner of one of the apartments in the Santorini Norte building, also thinks that the second sinkhole occurred due to the “bad management,” as he describes, that the MOP has made with the mitigation work. . Finally, he adds, “it turned out to be even worse and more people were affected. Everyone blames real estate agencies and that you can't build on dunes, but Viña is built on dunes. We had meetings with the engineers and they guaranteed the safety of the building, especially the Santorini which is staggered. “Everyone is about washing your hands.”

 

https://www.latercera.com/la-tercera-sabado/noticia/donde-vivir-el-incierto-futuro-despues-del-socavon-en-concon/QRQR7MAS2FGC3ICXFGJB4CSEPY/