The first ominous signs at the Jet Set nightclub came around midnight, when sprinkles of plaster and water from the ceiling landed on some of the hundreds of bankers, politicians, civil servants and former baseball players crowded inside Santo Domingo’s most popular club for a live concert.
About 40 minutes later, early on April 8, a heavy slab crashed down and split a table in two, the final warning that something terrible was about to happen at a club with a history of noise complaints and a collection of heavy air-conditioning equipment and water tanks on its leaky roof.
Moments later, the roof collapsed in a thunderous clap, killing 232 people and trapping nearly 200 others under a pile of concrete, machinery and other debris.
The Jet Set disaster has stunned the Dominican Republic and focused attention on what critics say is a glaring national weakness: the government does not routinely inspect the country’s aging structures. At least seven other buildings, including a furniture store, shopping center and office building, have collapsed in recent years, with fatal results.
“God warned us, but the music and the party didn’t let people hear it,” said Nelson Pimentel, 65, who was at Jet Set with friends from a seniors club. “When the first piece fell with the water, I looked up and saw what looked like repairs. I work in construction, and I can tell you: that construction looked very old.”
When the larger piece fell, he said, people had about 15 seconds to run. Ten of his friends did not make it.
Among those killed was the head of Santo Domingo’s office of urban infrastructure.
According to engineers and others watching the case closely, the focus of a government investigation appears to be the weight of equipment loaded onto the roof. Satellite images before the collapse show at least seven structures on the roof.
The disaster has prompted soul-searching by government officials, lawmakers and engineering experts over how it could have been prevented. Bills are being drawn up in the Dominican Congress to impose new inspection requirements, and, already, one courthouse in disrepair has been closed.
Neighbors had filed half a dozen excessive noise complaints about the club. They and others are asking if the constant shaking from the speaker system and an outdoor power generator produced frequencies so strong they undermined a weakened, 50-year-old structure to the point of catastrophic failure.
The roof, they noted, did not cave in on a day when the club was empty, but on its most popular night, suggesting to some experts that powerful vibrations from sound and dancing could have been the final catalyst to bring it down.
Acoustics experts say that while excessive noise was unlikely to have been the lone cause, it could have been a contributing factor, particularly at the low, thumping frequencies produced by subwoofers.
Officials from the prosecutor’s office, armed with sound meters, had visited the club several times in the past few years and a magistrate had recommended prosecuting Jet Set, after repeated violations, records show.
Records show that three times since 2023, inspectors from the Ministry of the Environment had recommended that prosecutors from the specialized environmental division take the case to court. In February, the division notified the neighborhood association that it would pursue the case.
But no legal action was taken against Jet Set, which is owned by a prominent family that also owns a restaurant and hotel in Manhattan, and 50 radio stations in the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican government has boasted of taking aggressive action against excessive noise. The Interior Ministry, in a crackdown named “Operation Keep the Peace,” said that in November it had confiscated more than 225 speakers from various venues.
Jet Set’s speakers were not among them.
The large media business overseen by Jet Set’s owner, Antonio Espaillat, makes him an influential figure able to control public opinion, said Teodoro Tejada, a former president of the Dominican Engineers, Architects and Surveyors Association.
“In this country, that means they don’t touch him with the petal of a flower,” he said.
Mr. Espaillat, in an interview broadcast Wednesday in Santo Domingo, expressed sorrow for the many deaths, but insisted that he had no prior knowledge of any structural problems with the building.
“The first one interested to know what happened is me,” he told a news program called El Día.
“To the families of the victims, I want to say I’m sorry,” he added. “I’m very sorry, I am completely destroyed.”
Through a spokeswoman for Jet Set and his lawyer, Mr. Espaillat declined to speak with The New York Times.
The government has formed a commission to investigate the collapse. The prosecutor’s office, which had looked into the noise complaints and is managing the new probe, declined repeated requests for comment, citing the ongoing investigation.
The Environment Ministry, whose technicians conducted the noise tests, and the Interior Minister also declined to comment, while the Santo Domingo mayor declined an interview request.
Jet Set opened 50 years ago and became a popular venue, particularly on Monday nights. It moved to the current location, a former movie theater a block from the sea, about 30 years ago.
Over those decades, Mr. Espaillat said in the television interview, the ceiling required constant repairs.
Ceiling panels would get soaked with water leaking from the air conditioning and were always falling, he said. Workers had replaced some the day of the collapse, he said.
“We always had the roof waterproofed, so we always understood it was an air conditioning issue,” he said. He stressed that he would have repaired anything that required fixing — after all, his mother and sister were always at the club.
Satellite images show a roughly 12-foot by 12-foot structure was added to the roof in late 2022.
“They had a lot of things up on that roof,” said Lilian Artiles, who lives directly behind the club and witnessed what looked like a large heavy metal cabinet or air conditioning compressor being raised onto the roof.
Last year the president of the neighborhood association that battled the club over noise complaints took a video of a crane hoisting that same object onto the club’s roof.
Investigators “will have to determine whether that structure was designed to support that additional weight,” José Espinosa Feliz, a civil engineer in Santo Domingo, said of the various units on the roof.
Mr. Espaillat told the TV interviewer that he had no way of knowing whether the equipment on the roof was too heavy.
“When you buy an air-conditioner, you never ask how much it weighs,” he said.
Permits are required for major renovations, but the government has not yet responded to a request for any permit records for the nightclub..
Several engineering experts said they believed the overloaded roof made the aging building more vulnerable to constant rattling from the noise.
Mr. Tejada said a combination of vibrations from the speakers, air-conditioners, generators and people dancing likely weakened support beams damaged by water. He also said photos of the debris seem to show several additional layers of fine concrete used for waterproofing had been applied to the roof, weight it was likely not designed to withstand.
“There comes a time when, combined with the excessive load, it produces an explosion,” he said.
Neighbors had been battling Jet Set since 2021, initially over an outdoor ground-level generator, which they said was in use almost all the time, not just during emergencies.
The authorities helped mediate a resolution. The club agreed not to use the generator as often, to soundproof the area around it, and to install a double door in the back of the club to muffle the sounds.
The mediator, also named Nelson Pimentel but not related to the survivor, said the roof was not inspected then because it was not relevant to the complaint.
“This kind of inspection is very specific, ’’ he said.
But even after the generator’s noise was minimized and the door installed, the club continued violating noise pollution laws, records show.
At least five lawsuits have been filed so far against Mr. Espaillat over the collapse, and also the mayor’s office and the state government claiming failure to properly inspect the building.
Leonardo Madera Reyes, director of the National Office for Seismic Assessment and Vulnerability of Infrastructure and Buildings, who leads the commission seeking to determine the cause, said he had submitted a preliminary report to the prosecutors office. He said he was not authorized to reveal the findings, which do not include any definitive conclusions.
Dozens of samples of material from the club’s debris were sent to a lab to assess things like the weight resistance of the beams, Mr. Madera said, and the results were pending.
“You have my guarantee what comes out of this will be the real truth of the possible cause of the collapse and tremendous loss of so many human beings and loved ones, many of whom we knew,” he said.
Jennifer Taveras, a 24-year-old manicurist and college student whose leg was broken in the disaster, recounted how the friend she was with pointed up at the ceiling after something had fallen.
She glanced in that direction, but before she could run for cover, the wall came down, pinning both her legs.
People who had been sitting at tables in front of the dance floor died instantly, she said.
“There were people in there who died without even ever knowing what happened; their lives just ended,” she said.
Other people in fancy clothes who had been singing and dancing and celebrating birthdays screamed in agony and called for help, Ms. Taveras recalled. Some shouted, “Turn off the power!” because they were being shocked by electrical currents as they lay mangled and unable to move.
“I couldn’t believe what I was experiencing,” she said from the hospital after doctors operated on her left leg. “I had people all around me, dead people. There was so much blood.”
Helmuth Rosales contributed reporting.
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