Subittai SuperMall Collapse
 The shopping centre after the collapse | |
| Date | January 3, 1981 |
|---|---|
| Time | 11:05 p.m. East Tavaris Time (UTC -8) |
| Location | Subittai, Tavaris |
| Cause | Structural overload |
| Deaths | 495 |
| Non-fatal injuries | 1,014 |
| Suspects | Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti |
| Verdict | Guilty |
| Convictions | Manslaughter, criminal negligence, and bribery |
| Sentence | 8 years in prison |
The Subittai SuperMall collapse was a building collapse that occurred in Subittai, Tavaris, a suburb of Nuvrenon, on January 3rd, 1981. Killing 495 people and injuring 1,014, it is the deadliest building collapse in Tavari history. Investigations after the collapse determined that the building should never have been certified as habitable due to numerous egregious violations of safety standards but that the developers had bribed provincial building safety inspectors to disregard the violations. The collapse triggered massive public outrage that was only compounded when the allegations of financial impropriety became public. Occurring in the middle of an election campaign for the National Diet, the issue quickly became a salient political cause and Prime Minister Bežra Išdašt Tovrenar credited the event as the reason she became focused on tackling the issue of the rampant corruption in the Tavari economy, her success in which would become her hallmark achievement.
Background and Location
The building was constructed from 1975-1977 by Cezhnetti and Family Construction, a wholly owned subsidiary of the bašdõran AtnaNuvo, which at the time was the wealthiest, largest, and most influential conglomerate in the Tavari economy. The company had been in the hands of the Atna family of Line Nuvo since it was formed in 1882 by a cousin of the royal family who inherited a vast sum of wealth from Queen Adra III after the monarchy was forced to give up its independent wealth in a reform. This “inheritance,” occurring well before Adra’s death, was widely seen as a naked attempt to preserve Line Nuvo’s massive wealth by keeping it out of government hands, and AtnaNuvo had always been considered the prime example of the “Tavari System of doing business”—ample bribes and kickbacks, with special privileges afforded to members of one’s own Tavari Line on an unspoken honour code—that had come to define the Tavari economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The collapse led to the legal dissolution of the company, and to this day AtnaNuvo exists only as a trust paying out settlement funds to victims and their families. While it is clear that executives at AtnaNuvo were aware of the situation at the Subittai SuperMall, only executives from the Cezhnetti and Family subsidiary were jailed. Company president Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti, who was also the Subittai SuperMall construction project leader, died in prison six years into an eight year sentence that was widely criticised in Tavari media as too short.
At the time the building was constructed, Subittai was a formerly predominantly rural township on the outermost ring of the Nuvrenon metropolitan area that, along with other such townships in its area, was going through a rapid development as post-war economic expansion led to an explosion of growth. Though there was some weakening of the economy in about 1970 due to ripples caused by the outbreak war in Aurora (at the time, the Tavari economy traded more with Aurora than with any other continent outside Gondwana), property values remained high well into the 1970s, and the real estate market in Greater Nuvrenon was especially hot. Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti is said to have been sorely disappointed with the high price she had to pay for the property, which was atop a landfill, and so sought to reduce construction costs as much as possible to maximise return on investment. However, in order to attain the most tax credits possible, over the course of the planning she continuously added onto the project to expand its size and thus the projected number of jobs it would create, thus qualifying for greater tax incentives.
Subittai was at the time a kind of municipality known as an “un-chartered township,” having the least autonomous authority and depending the most on its overarching provincial government of any kind of Tavari local government. Most authority was in the hands of the Nuvo Province Legislative Council, which as the legislature of the country’s largest province was primarily focused on other matters and conducted little oversight into the province’s semi-independent executive agencies like the Fire and Building Safety Authority. This agency, the sole agency in the province tasked with inspecting buildings, was routinely understaffed in the code compliance division. Investigators into the disaster cited these factors as a “major indirect cause” of the collapse. Seeking greater authority over building safety, and concerned about the integrity of other buildings constructed in the same construction boom, Subittai Township sought and received city status from the Legislative Council in 1983. The city established its own building safety code compliance department and promptly placed a moratorium on construction of buildings with more than one story, planned as temporary but never since rescinded. It is the most extreme building height restriction in the country.
The Subittai SuperMall
Initially, plans for the site were for a business park consisting of three buildings, each with three storeys. Two of the buildings were to be connected by a skyway. The firm Cezhnetti and Family was not even the original developer of the project but were contracted to construct the building for another firm, Lanaš Property Services, who were the developers who first purchased the property and finalised the plans. However, a few months after planning had commenced in 1975, the firing of Kevatuul created a market panic in an already unstable Tavari economy. Interest rates spiked at a time when they were already high, and Lanaš Property Services decided to pull out of the project.
Deciding that the opportunity presented a chance to get into the high value property market, Cezhnetti and Family took over the project by buying the land from Lanaš Property Services. Lanaš insisted on selling the property for what it had paid years earlier, when the market was even hotter, leaving Cezhnetti to feel a need to ensure the project was as profitable as possible to recoup the costs of the property. The plan immediately shifted to using the site to anchor more development by constructing something “everyone wanted to be around,” according to internal plans presented in court. The planned office park did not fit the bill, and the developers immediately shifted to entertainment and retail—not just a shopping centre but, as apparently coined by Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti herself, a “SuperMall,” borrowing from Codexian rather than, as is more typical in Tavaris, Staynish.
Beginning in late 1975, after construction of the office buildings had already begun, Cezhnetti and Family drastically changed their design. Instead of 3 three-storey buildings, there was to be one much more massive building of five storeys, with the fourth being a pool with multiple water slides and the fifth being, according to Cezhnetti and Family, “the largest food court in the country” featuring 40 different restaurants, three separate dining areas, and a dance hall featuring state-of-the-art audio-visual and lighting equipment, and even a lit floor. The bottom three storeys were to be for retail space, with half of the third floor becoming an Avtatóva Supercentre supermarket. The first storey included a Monata Automotive dealership. There were also some non-retail tenants, as Cezhnetti and Family had difficulty filling the space—the other half of the third storey contained an Ademarist church, a private school, and offices for the Nuvo Province Ministry of Public Health.
Collapse and Recovery
January 3rd, 1981 was a Saturday. In 1981, the Tavari New Year—the biggest holiday of the year, a two day festival in which nearly all businesses in the country close to give employees the days off—fell on a Thursday and Friday, leading right into the weekend. It is common in years that this occurs to treat the entire resulting four-day weekend as an extended festival, and the Subittai SuperMall advertised a “New Year Bonus Weekend Party” in the fifth storey food court with dancing, live music, and free food and drinks. The mall’s pool, on the fourth storey, was also to be open all night. Tickets were advertised in the Nuvrenon News at the price of 1 našdat each (about $0.02 SHD)—a significant error, as the organisers had intended to charge one thousand našdat, about $20.83 SHD. Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti decided to honour the typographical error on the belief that the increased volume of attendees would make up for the lower revenue per ticket. She was correct, as the event saw incredibly high interest—more than ten thousand tickets sold for a venue space whose lawful occupation limit was 2,500.
The primary cause of the collapse was quite simple: weight. There were far more people in the building than the building's structural supports could tolerate. This was because the building could not even tolerate its own weight—a Nuvo Province structural engineer testified in court that “the SuperMall would have collapsed entirely on its own, most certainly within a decade if not earlier, even if a single person never stepped foot inside it.” Cezhnetti and Family did not redesign the plan of the support columns from the original office park design. Two enormously heavy storeys had been stacked on top of that original design, and the building’s footprint had also been massively expanded without any thought into how this would change needs for structural support. As finalised, the design for the Subittai SuperMall was blatantly illegal and obviously in violation of fundamental engineering standards, but was permitted because Cezhnetti and Family bribed the regulators responsible for approving it.
Cracks had been reported in the ceiling of the fourth storey (i.e. the floor of the food court and dance hall) as early as October 1980. They were especially prominent over the pool itself, where there were no columns. Maintenance of the ceiling was deferred by Cezhnetti and Family because of the costs of having to close the entire pool to get under it so they could repair the ceiling above it. In December of 1980, two tenants of the third storey reported cracks in their ceilings, which were the pool floor, as well. That floor had been significantly thickened in order to handle the weight of the water, but poorly designed columns could not properly support the extra weight of the floor, and apparently no consideration had been made by Cezhnetti and Family to account for the fact that on top of the already heavy fourth storey was also the fifth storey, which was also unusually heavy due to the lightning and AV equipment associated with the dance hall. In other words, the fifth storey was already too heavy to be held up by the fourth, and both combined were far, far in excess of the capacity of the third.
By 10 pm that night, there were believed to be approximately 3,000 people in the top two storeys of the SuperMall. Further crowds were discouraged because there was no longer parking available at the site and both the dance floor and pool had become so full of people that it was becoming difficult to physically fit any more people in the space. Restaurants had also begun to run out of food because of greater than expected demand, and many of them closed. The air conditioning was also incapable of keeping the building cool with so many people inside, and at about 10, the air conditioning failed entirely. Significant disappointment on the behalf of attendees caused many of them to leave—it is likely that the collapse could have been even deadlier had these people not left. However, the sudden movement of many hundreds of people on the fifth floor as they began to leave once the aircon failed is thought to have played a role in instigating the final collapse. Other theories include the songs playing on the dance floor; with enthusiasm clearly having fallen significantly by that time, the DJ had begun deliberately choosing high-energy songs to encourage people to dance. Survivors from the fifth storey reported that they could feel vibrations in the floor as dancers stomped in unison, and one insisted they had heard cracking.
At 10:04 PM, a life guard went over the walkie talkie to note that there appeared to be some sort of debris on the pool deck; this report was ignored by building management. It is believed that by this time the fifth storey was already actively collapsing and that cracks and holes likely would have been visible on the ceiling above the pool, but the lights were dimmed to encourage a “party atmosphere,” and there were so few survivors from the fourth storey that none reported seeing any such evidence.
At approximately 11pm, a swimmer reported being injured by a chunk of concrete that had fallen from the ceiling. The injured swimmer had bled into the pool, which garnered attention—leading other swimmers to notice cracks not just on the ceiling but also on the floor of the pool. Lifeguards issued orders to evacuate the pool. Panic had already begun to set in, and crowds rushed toward the stairs. While a few hundred people did successfully make it out, by this time the collapse was already in progress. At 11:05 PM, the floor of the fifth storey collapsed into the fourth, and both then collapsed into the third and below. Over the span of a few seconds, the Subittai SuperMall essentially imploded. Only small portions of each floor next to the walls survived the initial collapse, and these gradually collapsed over the course of the next day.
There were about 1,500 people in the building at the time of the collapse, more than half of the peak an hour earlier. Many of these people were in stairwells, which were the most structurally secure part of the building, because they were already trying to leave. Of the 1,014 people who survived with injuries, about a third were in the stairwells. The bulk of the survivors were those who had been on the fifth storey and who fell onto the solid floor of the fourth rather than into the pool. No one in the pool survived. Also killed were eight people on the lower floors: six security guards, one member of the Ademarist clergy who lived in the church, and one child who, unbeknownst to his teachers, had been secretly sleeping in the school because his family had become homeless.
Aftermath
The public reaction to the collapse was swift and overwhelming rage. The news of the building having been so full of people, and anecdotes about ceiling and floor cracks, meant that suspicion was immediately placed on Cezhnetti and Family. The suspicion was only heightened after, on January 4th, seven people involved all, seemingly independently, committed suicide—four employees of Cezhnetti and Family and three Nuvo Province Fire and Building Safety Authority employees. There would be a further five suicides associated with the collapse, including that of the Nuvo Province Minister for Public Safety, who oversaw the Fire and Building Safety Authority and who is said to have been particularly affected by the death of the homeless schoolchild.
1981 General Election
The collapse occurred in the middle of the campaign for a general election. While all parties swiftly decried the developers and all promised investigations and changes of various kinds, the event particularly inspired Delegate Bežra Išdašt Tovrenar, leader of the Social Democratic Party, to take on the issue of business and public corruption. The governing Liberals were seen as being in the pocket of business interests, and Išdašt Tovrenar pilloried the Democratic National Party and even Green Tavaris on their failure to broach the issue of corruption during their various tenures in office. The Social Democrats, in contrast, had not been in government for decades at that point, and Išdašt Tovrenar leveraged her party’s status as a relative political outsider to garner support for her new campaigning around ethics reform.
Prior to the collapse, the issues in the election had mainly centred around tax cuts, the healthcare system, and the performance of the economy. Išdašt Tovrenar herself had focused on the issue of access to and costs of elder care in particular, as well as campaigning on raising taxes on the wealthy. She was already seeing a rise in popularity prior to the collapse, but afterward, her impassioned and nearly constant public appearances calling for change in the wake of the disaster saw her support skyrocket. The last opinion poll conducted in 1980 had projected 150 seats for the Social Democrats but a retained majority of 595 seats for the Liberals. By January 10th, polls were projecting a hung Diet and a Liberal-Social Democratic coalition (that had last occurred 20 years earlier.) The election, held on January 17th, saw the Social Democrats take 600 seats out of 1,172, a majority and their best result since 1947.
Legal Consequences and Damages
Charges were swiftly filed against not just Cezhnetti and Family as a company and various executives as individuals but also several government officials. Though not personally implicated in an ethical lapse, the First Councillor of Nuvo Province resigned, precipitating a provincial election (that would see the Social Democrats take an unheard of two-thirds supermajority) because he felt “the entire government of this province should take accountability for this gross negligence.” Even though provincial governments have no control over the Tavari judiciary, all trials for the cases involved were held in Elat Province courts (in Good Harbor, hundreds of kilometres north) out of fear that public corruption in Nuvo Province had spread to the courts.
Among those who were actually charged in criminal acts, there was a 100% conviction rate. However, there was some criticism that more individuals could have been charged than there were, which some ascribed to the number of public prosecutors remaining who had been appointed by the previous Liberal government. The Attorney General noted, however, that “frankly, a significant number of the people we would have charged killed themselves,” and also stated that the government focused on prosecuting those “for whom there was clear evidence of deliberate intent to violate the law” rather than, for example, the maintenance staff of the building or higher-level executives at the AtnaNuvo holding company for whom evidence of criminal intent was slim. In total, seven people were charged and convicted of manslaughter, criminal negligence, and bribery: Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti, CEO and project manager, her Chief Operating Officer, two Cezhnetti and Family architects, the Site Manager of the SuperMall building, and two employees of the Nuvo Province Fire and Building Safety Authority.
There was also major public outcry over the sentences of those convicted in the case, many of which were seen as overly lenient. While the decision to convict in most Tavari court cases is done by the jury, sentencing is the responsibility of the judge. Five of the eight cases were overseen by one judge who was in particular criticised for lenient sentences: he sentenced the two government employees only with time served—by that point, about 10 months—for bribery while disregarding culpability in the collapse of the building and the subsequent deaths. Most crucially, despite the prosecution laying out a clear pattern of deliberate, outright defiance of the law to knowingly put customers at risk of death by violating safety standards, which caused the deadliest casualty event in Tavaris since the end of the Great War and killed nearly 500 people, the judge sentenced CEO Vandra Nuvo Cezhnetti to only 8 years in prison when official sentencing guidelines recommended 12-20 and the law permitted as high as life in prison. She would, however, end her life in prison, as she died of natural causes 6 years into her sentence.
During the trials, several Cezhnetti and Family employees provided testimony that they had informed various employees at AtnaNuvo of impropriety they had witnessed, and the government used this testimony as evidence against AtnaNuvo and its senior executives when it took them to trial for negligence and other related charges. However, the most devastating legal consequences came from civil trials for damages from the families of the deceased as well as the survivors. The verdicts against Cezhnetti and Family, billions of našdat, quickly bankrupted the company. Under Tavari law, as in most similar jurisdictions, the doctrine of limited liability generally insulated the shareholders of a company—Cezhnetti and Family had precisely one shareholder, AtnaNuvo—from being held responsible for the debts of the company, even if the company failed to meet its obligations. However, in the landmark legal case His Majesty the King v. V.K. Armova AtnaNuvo, the court ruled that because of AtnaNuvo’s “demonstrated knowledge of safety violations so egregious as to be plainly facially obviously deadly, and willful choice to disregard this knowledge and take no action whatsoever, AtnaNuvo must be held to share responsibility for the cause of these damages, and thus, cannot use the doctrine of limited liability to escape legal consequences.” In essence, once officers of AtnaNuvo became aware that their subsidiary was actively placing lives in jeopardy, the judge ruled that AtnaNuvo became complicit in those actions. The ruling was narrowly tailored in that it only applied because the AtnaNuvo holding company was the sole shareholder of Cezhnetti and Family and because of the particularly clear evidence that AtnaNuvo executives had knowledge of the crimes committed by Cezhnetti and Family. However, because many of the largest Tavari companies were similarly structured, the ruling sent shockwaves of panic through the Tavari business community. When the ruling came down in 1983, a stock market crash occurred and the Tavari economy entered a recession.
In His Majesty the King v. V.K. Armova AtnaNuvo, it was ruled that both AtnaNuvo and Cezhnetti and Family would be required to pay damages to the victims and survivors. Tavari common law allows judges to multiply the amount of damages owed in cases of “extremely egregious violations,” a term that is undefined. In this case, the judge multiplied the damages by a factor of twelve, the remarkably rarely imposed but customarily permitted maximum, because of the “demonstrated pattern of knowledge of the deadly risks and choosing to ignore them.” Then, in an entirely unprecedented measure, the judge multiplied the damages by twelve a second time, citing an extremely ancient legal precedent that had never been used in a modern court. Noting the specific presence of a place of worship and a school, as well as the fact that at least one person was living there, the judge declared that the Subittai SuperMall met the definition of an ancient Tavari legal concept, the uvren. In other contexts, the word uvren is an archaic adjective meaning “safe, sheltered, or set aside” and is used by Akronists to refer to food products that are verified as being safe to eat. It also features in the name of the city Nuvrenon. In the legal context an uvren is not typically a single building—the term was prior to the case usually understood to mean entire places of settlement, as in towns and cities. Tavari common law states that there is an obligation on the part of the authorities of an uvren to ensure the safety of the people who dwell there, but this was usually understood to bind the state, not individuals. However, the judge ruled that because AtnaNuvo and Cezhnetti and Family constructed a facility containing places of commerce, places for the provision of food and drink, and the aforementioned places of worship and education, and that someone was living there, they had in fact constructed a “private uvren,” essentially a privately owned village contained in one large building, and had thus “taken upon themselves the very same duty the state has toward its people to keep them safe from those harms from which it can be reasonably expected to protect them, and then flagrantly, cruelly abandoned that duty for the sake of profit.” The judge stated “this can only be described as an act of evil.”
The initial amount of damages was 18,108,000,000 Tavari našdat, which was 12 million per victim. (This is equivalent to about $377 million SHD, or $250,000 per victim.) The first multiplication increased these damages to more than 217 million našdat, or more than $4.5 billion, which already would have devastated AtnaNuvo. The unprecedented double multiplication increased the damages to just over 2.6 trillion našdat, $54.2 billion SHD, in 1983. (In 2024, this would work out to $168 billion SHD.) This amount was entirely insurmountable even for the largest, most valuable company in the Tavari economy, and the judge stated in his ruling that it was intended to be “a corporate death sentence.” AtnaNuvo declared bankruptcy within days of the ruling after having to put up quite literally all of its cash on hand to pay for a bond to appeal the ruling. In the bankruptcy proceedings, AtnaNuvo was forced to sell every one of its subsidiary companies and use the resulting monies to fund a trust fund for the victims of the collapse. Technically, AtnaNuvo Holdings Company still exists, but only in the form of this trust. In 1987, after the Supreme Constitutional Court upheld the ruling, the Tavari Diet voted by two-thirds to overturn the ruling in respect to the expansion of the definition of “uvren”—a move that was incredibly unpopular among the public. However, while that prevents any future courts from considering private property to be an uvren, it cannot overturn the sentence already issued to AtnaNuvo. In a less controversial move, the Diet also passed a law stating that no judge can impose a multiplication of damages more than once in a single judgement.