Unbearable wait for relatives in nightclub disaster

Maximo Peña had been coming to the Jet Set nightclub every single Monday for the past 30 years.

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

“I haven’t heard any news about any of them,” says Shailyn Peña, Maximo’s 17-year-old daughter as she sits on a wall outside the devastated venue.

“It was just another Monday night for them. In fact, my dad invited my mum to come too but at the last minute she decided not to go. It was a blessing in disguise.”

Behind her as she speaks, a team of rescue workers is meticulously going through the rubble inside the building, listening for the slightest sound of a survivor beneath them. They have been joined by Israeli and Mexican search teams and are using sophisticated heat-seeking equipment to try to locate anyone still alive.

Shailyn tells me her cousin is one of the rescue workers, sifting through the debris for her own uncle, which brings her peace of mind that a relative is inside, doing everything in her power to try to track him down.

But the uncertainty and the endless wait for information are becoming unbearable, Shailyn says.

“I feel the urge to just go in there and push aside all the rocks and pull him out. But as much as I want to, I really can’t. I just have to sit here and wait it out.”

For their part, the authorities are doing what they can to keep the public informed, delivering grim updates on the number of dead, which has risen steadily with every passing hour. At regular intervals, a team emerges from the site carrying a body covered by a blanket on a stretcher.

Occasionally, although more rarely now, someone is brought out alive, bolstering the hopes of the relatives. The emergency services insist survivors can still be reached in the debris.

“Nothing can be ruled out,” said the Director of the Emergency Operations Centre, Juan Manuel Mendez. “We are going to go over every inch of the rubble here to give the families of those caught up in the disaster some kind of closure.”

The President of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, declared three days of national mourning, a reflection of the scale of the tragedy unfolding at the site.

Among those confirmed to have lost their lives in the accident were some well-known national figures including Pérez himself, two much-loved former baseball players, Octavio Dotel and Tony Blanco, and a regional governor. And alongside them, scores of merengue music-lovers and Pérez fans also died in the collapse.

For as long as there is a feasible chance of success, the authorities’ focus remains on the search and rescue operation. However, eventually the questions will turn to the cause of the collapse and government investigators will have to provide meaningful answers to the families in due course.

One theory is already circulating outside the venue. Many are pointing the finger of blame at a fire at the nightclub around two years ago. Some fear the blaze structurally weakened the site or that any repairs carried out were insufficient or not up to code.

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

He also insisted that he and his team were co-operating “totally and transparently with the authorities” over the disaster.

Shailyn Peña has heard about the fire at the nightclub and is among those who thinks it played a part. However, for now she has bigger worries. Despite the family’s efforts to protect them, her younger stepsisters found out that their father and mother were trapped under the rubble from other children at school.

They are “terrified”, she added.

It is Shailyn’s birthday on Thursday, a day she would normally celebrate alongside her father, stepmother and aunt.

Instead, she must endure it in the worst possible circumstances, waiting for news of her missing loved ones, caught inside the worst such tragedy in her country’s modern history.