Unbearable expectation for loved ones in disaster of the nightclub of the Dominican Republic

Maximo Peña came to the Jet Set nightclub every Monday for 30 years.

This week, delighted to see a concert by the popular Dominican singer Rubby Pérez, he took his wife and sister. Now, all three are buried under the rubble of the collapsed disco, after the roof has collapsed in part through performance, leaving at least 184 dead.

“I have heard no news about them,” said Shailyn Peña, Maximo’s daughter, 17, while she sits on a wall outside the devastated place.

“It was just another Monday evening for them. In fact, my father invited my mother to come too, but at the last minute, she decided not to go. It was a disguised blessing.”

Behind her while she speaks, a team of rescuers meticulously crosses the rubble inside the building, listening to the slightest sound of a survivor under them. They were joined by Israeli and Mexican research teams and use sophisticated heat search equipment to try to locate anyone alive.

Shailyn tells me that his cousin is one of the rescuers, passing through the debris of his own uncle, which makes the peace of mind that a parent is inside, doing everything in his power to try to find him.

But the uncertainty and the endless expectation for the information becomes unbearable, says Shailyn.

“I feel the desire to go and push all the rocks and to remove it. But as much as I want, I really can’t. I just have to sit here and wait.”

For their part, the authorities do what they can to hold the informed public, offering dark updates on the number of deaths, which has increased regularly with every passing hours. At regular intervals, a team emerged from the site with a body covered with a coverage on a stretcher.

On occasion, although more rarely now, someone is living alive, strengthening the hopes of loved ones. Emergency services insist that survivors can always be reached in debris.

“Nothing can be excluded,” said the director of the emergency operations center, Juan Manuel Mendez. “We are going to go through every centimeter of the rubble here to give families taken in the disaster a kind of closure.”

The President of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, said three days of national mourning, a reflection of the tragedy scale which takes place on the site.

Among the people confirmed for having lost their lives in the accident, there were well-known national personalities, notably Pérez himself, two former much appreciated baseball players, Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and a regional governor. And by their side, dozens of fans of music from Merengue and Fans of Pérez also died in the collapse.

As long as there are chances of achievable success, the authorities focus on the research and rescue operation. However, the questions will eventually turn to the cause of collapse and government investigators will have to provide significant responses to families in due course.

A theory already circulates outside the place. Many point your finger on a fire in the nightclub about two years ago. Some fear that the fire structurally weakens the site or that all the repairs made will be insufficient or not to the code.

The owner of the Jet Set nightclub, Antonio Espailt, delivered a video message via the social media expressing his condolences and those of “the whole family of Jet Set”, to the relatives of the victims.

He also insisted that he and his team cooperate “completely and transparent with the authorities” on the disaster.

Shailyn Peña has heard of the fire in the nightclub and is one of those who think he played a role. However, for the moment, she has greater worries. Despite the family’s efforts to protect them, his young half-sisters discovered that their father and mother were trapped under the rubble of other school children.

They are “terrified”, she added.

It is Shailyn’s birthday on Thursday, one day that she would normally celebrate alongside her father, her mother-in-law and her aunt.

Instead, she must bear it in the worst possible circumstances, while waiting for the news of her missing relatives, taken in the worst tragedy of this type of modern history of her country.