The Ministry of Health of the Valencian Generalitat has notified this Sunday the death of one of the women hospitalized as a result of the fire that occurred in a nursing home in the Valencian town of Moncada last Tuesday night.
She is the seventh fatality of the fire that started in a room for large dependents of the Residence for the Third Age, located on the town's main street, 12 kilometers from Valencia.
Mónica Oltra, Minister of Equality and Inclusive Policies, on which the residence depends, publicly owned and privately managed (awarded to the Gesmed company), reported last Friday that eight people remained hospitalized. Of these, a 94-year-old resident was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and two others had a serious prognosis. The person admitted to the ICU is a 94-year-old woman. The other two serious people are also women, 85 and 87 years old. The identity of the woman who died this Sunday has not transpired at the moment.
The fire was declared around 11:21 p.m., and according to the preliminary report of the Civil Guard, it could have been caused by an electrical anomaly in a strip in the room, located on the first floor of the wing where the residents with the highest degree of dependency lived. . The Government delegate, Gloria Calero, stressed on Friday that the Civil Guard's investigation is being carried out "beyond the strip" and must resolve "why the strip did what it did", among other issues. The Court of First Instance and Instruction number 3 of Moncada (Valencia) investigates the case.
The users of the damaged wing, most of them bedridden, had to be rescued one by one by members of the Civil Guard, the Local Police, the firefighters and the residence staff, who carried out a human chain.
At the time of the fire there were 81 people in the residence.
Five of the residents died in the same place and two of them in hospital centers.
One on Wednesday, hours after the incident, and another this Sunday.
Since 2000, around 70 people have died in fires registered in geriatric residences in Spain.
The most serious one occurred on July 12, 2015 and nine elderly people died and another 12 were injured in the private residence Santa Fe, in Cuarte de Huerva, six kilometers from Zaragoza.