Deputies Macarena Santelices (independent-UDI) and Paz Charpentier (Republicanos), members of the Housing Committee of the Cámara (Chile's lower house), warned about the neglect of Chile's architectural heritage, according to CNN Chile. The warning followed the partial collapse of an old adobe house in Santiago.
The property had already been closed and was under an uninhabitability decree due to structural problems. The collapse of its roof forced the preventive evacuation of dozens of residents from an adjacent building. The source does not specify the exact address of the property or the date of the collapse.
Local authorities preliminarily attributed the failure to recent heavy rain and hailstorms. For the lawmakers, this weather factor is recurring in other parts of the country and threatens old buildings from north to south.
Santelices said what happened is "a red alert for all of Chile". According to the deputy, historic buildings are in total neglect, caught between illegal land occupations, government negligence and the structural damage left by harsh weather. "We cannot wait for them to fall to pieces or put human lives at risk," she said.
The lawmaker called for a special joint session of the Housing and Culture committees of the Cámara de Diputadas y Diputados (Chile's Chamber of Deputies), to bring together all the responsible authorities. "It cannot be that more than a hundred heritage homes in the Región Metropolitana are in utter neglect," she said, referring to the Santiago Metropolitan Region.
Charpentier, for her part, turned the focus to the south. "What we have seen in Santiago is extremely serious, but it is a reality that is repeated in the historic centers of the Biobío Region," she said, adding that authorities cannot keep reacting on the fly when neighbors' lives are at stake.
The deputies propose preventively identifying old buildings with structural failures, irregular occupations or other risk factors. With that inventory, they propose building a public conservation policy before the damage becomes irreversible.
Charpentier sent formal requests to the Ministries of Security, of Housing and Urban Planning, and of Cultures, Arts and Heritage. She seeks to learn what security, conservation and maintenance actions the Government has carried out on abandoned historic properties. The source does not yet report responses from those ministries or a date for the requested session.
