A Barcelona fire truck was on the front line of the war in Ukraine last Monday.
Two Russian cruise missiles hit the Ministry of Education in the heart of kyiv that day.
A few minutes later, a unit from the State Emergency Service arrived aboard the Man number 4 vehicle that Barcelona City Council had donated last June to the Ukrainian capital.
The fire devoured the building and also half a dozen cars that were surprised by a third missile that hit the road.
For the firefighting teams, this was no ordinary task: it was the first large-scale bombardment of the heart of kyiv, and the attack was not over.
The risk to the fire crew and their truck was extraordinary: on many occasions, if the Russian enemy feels it is paramount to destroy a target, they fire a second round of missiles.
This was not the case, although during the extinction tasks, and this newspaper was testimony, two Russian missiles once again flew over the university neighborhood —where the fire team was located— and impacted just one kilometer away, on the skyscraper that serves as a headquarters of the largest energy company in the country, DTEK.
The fact that the truck donated by Barcelona participated in this operation indicates that it has been assigned to the protection of the most important districts of the capital, where the main decision-making bodies of Ukraine are located: within a radius of one kilometer there is the office of the president , Volodymyr Zelensky, the seat of the Ukrainian Parliament and the kyiv City Council, as well as ministries and embassies.
Last March, the Barcelona City Council ceded two fire trucks from the Catalan capital to the kyiv Consistory.
EL PAÍS has been able to compile the details of this transfer of vehicles.
One of the architects is Antonio Cabeza, fire chief of the material resources unit of the Barcelona City Council.
“At the beginning of the war I saw on television that Ukrainian firefighters rescued people with very few material resources.
They were rescues where not only they could harm themselves but also the rescued themselves.
It was at that moment when I thought that in Barcelona we had materials that we were not using and that could be useful”, recalls Cabeza.
The vehicles donated are a heavy urban fire truck (B318) and an articulated arm (E19).
As announced by the City Council of the Catalan capital, in March, they would be used to deal with the disasters caused daily by the bombings of the Russian army.
“The autoarm has a height of 37 meters and is used for rescues on the façade.
In Barcelona we have replaced it with other vehicles.
We also had the 3,000-liter pumper, but here we used other smaller vehicles,” says the fire chief.
“We contacted the consulate and the State Emergency Service of Ukraine.
We told them that apart from these trucks we had other protection material that we had discontinued, ”she recalls.
The bureaucracy prevailed.
The City Council was the owner of one of the cars and the Port of Barcelona, of the other.
In the end, the transfer of both was agreed and on May 30, Cabezas and seven other firefighters drove the two vehicles and two vans loaded with material to the Polish-Ukrainian border.
“When we saw what other countries delivered to them, we knew that they were going to use our trucks a lot,” he is proud.
Both vehicles are very technical and difficult to use.
They were given the instructions in English but the Barcelona firefighters wanted them to get the most out of it.
“We recorded some videos in which our firefighters appeared explaining how the trucks worked.
We made those videos in English but we doubted if they would understand them.
So it occurred to us to go to the queues of Ukrainians who were at the Fira de Barcelona claiming asylum.
There we located one who knew English and we recorded a translation in Ukrainian.
That way we were able to add a
voiceover
to the videos,” says the fire chief.
A few weeks after the transfer, the Ukrainian firefighters sent photographs of how they had reformed the water connectors, since the connections in Ukraine are different from those in Barcelona.
"We were anxious to see our trucks in operation and it was right at La Mercè when they sent us photographs of the two vehicles rescuing people," he reports proudly.
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