The Local Court of Guimarães today sentenced two engineers tried in the case of the landslide in 2013 in the parish of Mesão Frio, in that municipality in the district of Braga, to a suspended sentence of two years and three months.
In reading out the sentence, the judge proved the facts in the prosecution’s indictment, convicting the civil engineers of the crime of infringing building regulations, damaging installations and disrupting services.
According to the court, both the 51-year-old construction manager and the 48-year-old civil engineer, who signed the architectural and specialty projects for the development as a trainee, acted maliciously and violated the duties inherent in the roles they each performed in the construction.
The judge held, for example, that the defendant “admitted that the quality of the landfill was not the best, but that he did nothing to prevent” the development from going ahead, also proving that he carried out the duties of site manager and not just that of a simple inspector, as he claimed in court.
According to the magistrate, the defendants had “a special duty to avoid danger”, given their respective roles and responsibilities, which they failed to do by violating the rules of conduct and techniques, particularly with regard to the landfill that eventually gave way.
Recalling the “very serious consequences” caused by the landslide, the Guimarães Local Criminal Court also said that the defendants, on trial, “showed no regret whatsoever”, always displaying “an attitude of non-responsibility and apology” for what happened.
The defendants were also ordered to pay, jointly and severally, 2,500 euros to two of the affected residents who filed a civil claim.
As the court was leaving, the defendant and her lawyer did not want to make any statements to journalists, while the defendant was not present at the reading of the sentence.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) charges that, in the context of building a real estate development consisting of 10 houses, the contractors built, from March 15, 2007 to February 22, 2008, an embankment in Mesão Frio, Guimarães municipality, “together with the accused engineers, which did not observe the good construction rules contained in the regulations applicable to this type of construction, namely those relating to drainage and soil composition”.
“As a direct and necessary consequence of these construction defects”, on April 2, 2013 “the soils of the construction site, as well as the slope, slid for a length of 60 meters and a height of 50 meters”, the MP stresses.
On the bypass to National Road 201 (EN201), 12,000 cubic meters of earth and mud were deposited on the road.
For the Public Prosecutor’s Office, “only by chance” did the landslide not cause “damage to the lives and physical integrity of the residents of the houses and the commuters on the bypass”.
The road, which connects Guimarães to the neighboring municipality of Fafe, was closed for more than two weeks.
The 10 houses were left “bare” and their residents were barred from entering them for eight months.
