Building Collapse in Los Cristianos, Tenerife

Buildings that collapse: the causes of the disaster

When the finishes of a floor slab are levelled, whether the flooring covering the upper face or the plaster applied to the underside, the result is a numerical representation of a surface made up of two fundamental components: the construction irregularities of the finish, and the vertical movements the floor slab has undergone over its history.
In the same way, a wooden bookshelf can be levelled at any given moment, giving a surface that contains the surface irregularities of the wood and the vertical movements the shelf has undergone because of the weight of the books it holds.
On floor slabs, the flooring should be levelled, since it normally has fewer irregularities than plaster.

Under the action of the loads acting on it, the floor slab and its finishes undergo vertical movements.
At a given moment, the surface of the flooring can be obtained as the sum of the construction irregularities of the flooring and the vertical movements of the floor slab that have occurred since then.
At that moment, the surface of the flooring can be reproduced by a particular mathematical expression, with a certain error associated with a certain confidence level.