Palace II was a

tower block A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building A building, or edifice, is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls standing more or less permanently ...

built at

Barra da Tijuca Barra da Tijuca () (usually known as Barra) is an upper-class neighborhood or bairro in the Rio de Janeiro#West Zone, West Zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, located in the western portion of the city on the Atlantic Ocean. Barra is well known for it ...

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. On February 22, 1998, parts of it collapsed, due to engineering error, killing eight people. Another part of its structure collapsed on February 27, 1998, and the remaining parts of the building were demolished on February 28, 1998. Before the building was demolished, researchers found empty

piers Piers may refer to: * Pier, a raised structure over a body of water * Pier (architecture), an architectural support * Piers (name), a given name and surname (including lists of people with the name) * Piers baronets, two titles, in the baronetages ...

and evidence of the usage of

beach A beach is a landform alongside a body of water which consists of loose particles. The particles composing a beach are typically made from rock, such as sand, gravel, shingle, pebbles, etc., or biological sources, such as mollusc shel ...

sand Sand is a granular material composed of finely divided mineral particles. Sand has various compositions but is defined by its grain size. Sand grains are smaller than gravel and coarser than silt. Sand can also refer to a textural class of s ...

on the construction. All families had to move to hotels after the building's fall. They had no time to collect their personal objects in their apartments. Although most of them have not yet received any kind of

indemnity In contract law, an indemnity is a contractual obligation of one party (the ''indemnitor'') to compensate the loss incurred by another party (the ''indemnitee'') due to the relevant acts of the indemnitor or any other party. The duty to indemni ...

from the company responsible for building their homes, the Superior Court of Justice of Brazil announced, on April 9, 2008, the unblocking of 13 million

reais The Brazilian real ( pl. '; sign: R$; code: BRL) is the official currency of Brazil. It is subdivided into 100 centavos. The Central Bank of Brazil is the central bank and the issuing authority. The real replaced the cruzeiro real in 1994. A ...

(~6.5 million US dollars) earned through the

auction An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest bidder. Some exceptions to this definition ex ...

of a property of Sérgio Naya, the

civil engineer A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing ...

who had designed and built the building, which will be given to the 130 families who lived there.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Palace Ii 1998 in Brazil 1998 disasters in Brazil Demolished buildings and structures in Brazil Collapsed buildings and structures Disasters in Brazil February 1998 events Buildings and structures in Rio de Janeiro (city) Building collapses in 1998 Building collapses in Brazil Residential buildings completed in 1995 Buildings and structures demolished in 1998 Former skyscrapers