Reading the report of the $20 million judicial inquiry into the Algo Centre Mall collapse on June 23, 2012, you’d think Elliot Lake wasn’t in Ontario, but the Third World.

As inquiry head Paul Belanger put it Wednesday, the collapse was due to more than three decades of human failure, ranging from “apathy, neglect and indifference, through mediocrity, ineptitude and incompetence, to outright greed, obfuscation and duplicity.”

As a result, two people needlessly died — Doloris Perizzolo, 74, and Lucie Aylwin, 37, while 19 others were injured.

Belanger said evidence before the inquiry — which heard from 118 witnesses and reviewed over a million pages of documents — suggests Perizzolo died almost instantly, but that Aylwin may have survived for up to 39 hours.

This during a badly co-ordinated rescue effort by a provincial urban search and rescue team which ignored offers of assistance from experienced local mine rescuers and called off the effort due to dangerous conditions, rather than postpone it to consider other options.

The inquiry found warnings from townspeople that the mall’s poorly designed roof — a parking lot for cars — was in danger of collapsing due to constant and severe water leakage, were ignored by the owners and municipal and provincial officials.

While the mall was sarcastically referred to locally as “Algo Falls” because so much water was leaking into it, engineers told clients what they wanted to hear instead of the truth, in one instance altering an inspection report at the client’s request.

The inquiry found the owner of the mall when it collapsed misled tenants, the public and authorities about repair work.

Municipal politicians and officials were willfully blind to what was going on because they feared closing down the popular mall and losing tax revenues.

Municipal inspectors were incompetent and provincial officials indifferent, the inquiry found, despite the fact the Ontario labour ministry had offices in the mall.

While the inquiry praised then premier Dalton McGuinty for restarting the rescue effort after it was called off and makes 71 recommendations in all, the truth is that if people had behaved responsibly and done their jobs, the mall wouldn’t have collapsed.

So far, only one individual, an engineer, has been charged criminally in this tragedy.

That doesn’t seem like nearly enough​.