I got a call at about ten o’clock at night, on a cold winter’s day, from an English client. A neighbour’s house had fallen down, one of the 42 houses on the urbanisation where he lived, ninety kilometres from my office and home. I had no idea what a lawyer could do about that. But the person calling took it for granted that I should come with an architect.
So I called the nearest architect, explained the call, and ten minutes later I picked him up in the car and we drove to the site.
We found a lady in tears, surrounded by foreign neighbours comforting her, because the house –a small detached villa on that urbanisation- had indeed gone “crack”, “crack”, and had literally come down.
The lady was unhurt: when the cracks started opening with loud noises and the ceiling fell in another room, she was in the kitchen and got out in time, into the open street.
I already spoke English, and confined myself to translating what the architect said. The house had to be evacuated. And he, as an architect, was authorised by law to give the evacuation order. I had no idea that such things happened, nor that houses went “crack”, “crack”, nor about the evacuation the architect was ordering. The neighbours kindly took the lady in that night, and early the next day she set me to work on the matter.
I am not ashamed, quite the opposite, to admit now (nor was I then) that I had no idea what I was up against. No idea what had to be done legally, and no idea of the environment I had to confront. No idea either that I was facing a field of tremendous specialisation, absolutist and exclusive, and that I would be treated as an intruder, although over time, in that field, my colleagues -architects and lawyers- and I have earned our living for almost the last thirty-five years.
To begin with, architects in those days considered themselves gods. And their professional associations and their lawyers, by imitation, believed it too. They believed they owned the language. If I dared to mention the words girder or beam, ring beam, crack, hairline crack, or differential settlement, shallow foundations on fill or anything like that, terminology that any ordinary person understands today, they would look down their noses at you with an arrogant expression: “and what does he know about it?”.
Back to the matter. I spoke to the Association of Architects, and to the lawyer who rarely defended them -because there were not many lawsuits against them, since they were gods-. I explained the matter.
They did not remotely hold their architect responsible, and if I wanted, I could blame others. They were architects, a guild of highly qualified, cultured professionals, almost artists. Condescendingly, they offered me between 300,000 and 400,000 pesetas (today between €1,800 and €2,400). Obviously, I refused.
I left the meeting disappointed and downcast. I then carefully prepared a lawsuit against the Architect, the Developer, the Building Contractor and the Quantity Surveyor.
I found out through my architect that the urbanisation was on dubious ground, land that seemed to be made up of dumped fill. I established that the houses had been built with load-bearing walls on a very shallow perimeter trench foundation. But worst of all, on the land where the urbanisation, its streets and the 42 villas stood, remains of amphorae had been found, in other words, it contained archaeological remains. That is to say, there had been human settlements there for thousands of years, and consequently there were remains of them underground. At shallow depth, -two or three metres-, the ground was not firm. To put it simply, it was fill.
And in the twentieth century, on top of that, some modern-day god had designed and directed the construction of the villas in question, 42 in all. Over the following 7 years I filed 42 lawsuits. I reckon I went to that urbanisation some 300 times (300 journeys there and as many back), not counting the trials, and including inspections of each house with my architect, judicial inspections of each house, -because the judges readily accepted that evidence so that they could learn first-hand for themselves-, and accompanying the opposing expert. Every lawsuit was won. Each of the owners obtained around 50 times what I had been offered in those first days to repair them.
As I had a plan of the urbanisation with the slopes and levels, to know where the water ran, every time a new client there entrusted me with their house, I knew where its worst settlement was and where the most spectacular crack was. Sometimes they were hidden inside the fitted wardrobes, and not even the client knew about them.
Oh, and by the way, I almost forgot: all the houses had two things in common, their design –they were all identical- and the fact that ALL of them leaned like the Tower of Pisa. If you put a marble on the floor, it rolled and rolled like mad all the way to the wall. Honestly, you couldn’t make it up.
For me, that was my own personal master’s degree, my start, my beginning….. but that was some thirty-five years ago, not exactly yesterday.
Francisco Moya. Lawyer, member of the Bar since 1975. Founding partner of DPcon S.L.
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