The engineer rejected the blame for the collapse of part of the reconstructed building in the center of Prague

Prague - Engineer Jiří Houra, who faces charges of negligent serious bodily injury due to the collapse of a reconstructed building on Mikulandská Street in Prague, today denied guilt in court. He denied having authorial supervision at the construction site at the time of the accident. He described the expert opinion that deemed him guilty as a purpose-driven document commissioned by the general contractor of the construction - Metrostav. The incident occurred on July 17, 2018, during the reconstruction of a former elementary school building into a technology center called UMPRUM. The debris injured three workers, with a nineteen-year-old man from Ukraine being left permanently paralyzed.

In the third floor of the building, the vault collapsed, followed by the ceilings in the second and first floors. One of the workers who was cleaning at the time escaped with minor bruises. The second suffered multiple fractures of his leg, which he treated for several months. The youngest of the workers was taken by rescuers to the hospital with shattered cervical and lumbar vertebrae, broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a shattered femur.

The indictment states that the responsibility for the collapse of the vaults rests on the manager of the Prague company HSD statika, who was the author of the static part of the project documentation, Houra. According to the prosecutor, she was in the position of authorial supervision over the static part of the construction and was supposed to monitor compliance between the construction being carried out and the proposed documentation at that time.

He did not recognize the danger of the vaults collapsing, which threatened the construction after cracks appeared in them. After visiting the site less than a week before the accident, he only prohibited machine movement, not the movement of people. He was not present on the site after that and responded to warnings about the widening cracks with a text message saying that "the situation does not look that dramatic."

"I insist that I was not conducting authorial supervision at the time before the accident of the building," declared the fifty-three-year-old Houra today at the District Court for Prague 1. He stated that the work at that time was unrelated to his project. According to his own words, he verbally agreed to take on the role of an informal advisor and expert at a meeting with Metrostav, who would advise the site manager if necessary.

"I considered it an advisory activity. If my work had been a responsible activity, I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to informal communication via texts and emails; I would have been writing in the construction diary and sending statements on letterhead," the engineer defended himself. He came up with the version that he signed the submitted backdated static assessment 14 days after the accident. He called that a big mistake and said he hadn’t read the document properly. He also mentioned that Metrostav wanted to exonerate two of its site managers with subsequent expert opinions.

According to Houra, the cause of the accident was that the builders made openings in the load-bearing structure to measure it. They thus compromised the ceiling ties, which are a crucial element for the stability of the structure. "The timeline for the cracks' formation is clearly linked to Metrostav’s activities during the preparatory work," he pointed out. "They were asking in a defensive manner whether it was possible to continue working," he noted regarding the builders. He also pointed out the footage from cameras in the opposite building, according to which building materials stored behind the chimney likely overloaded the upper vault.

Houra faces a prison sentence of six months to four years or a monetary fine. Metrostav has the status of a victim in the criminal proceedings. It did not raise a claim for damages, as the costs for removing the consequences of the accident were covered by insurance. The young man who ended up in a wheelchair is claiming over 29 million crowns through his representative.