Carla Ahumada, a Chilean, 35, and Yanela Tartillo, a Peruvian, 21, seem lost this Wednesday in the hall of the Valencia Palace, one of the hotels in the city that have offered to urgently accommodate people who lost their homes. in the wild fire that destroyed a huge building on Maestro Rodrigo Avenue on Tuesday.
“I was getting out of the shower when I smelled it.
I told my boyfriend, who went to look out the balcony and when he came back he told me: 'Get out, get out, get out!'.
I grabbed the cell phone and left the house in a towel, half naked, with almost no clothes.
When we got downstairs we found people crying, people who wanted to go back inside to get their pets, and I had a panic attack,” says Carla.
“I had been in Spain for four days and I lost everything.
My passport, my clothes... All my clothing is donated.
“I never imagined it would be like this.”
In the same apartment at that moment, listening to music with headphones, was Yanela Tardillo, a Peruvian, 21 years old, niece of Carla's boyfriend.
“At first we thought the smell was coming from our house, because that was my strong suit.
My uncle went out to the terrace, I looked out with him and we saw the fire alive and the police shouting from the street: 'Get down, get down, get down!'
In my desperation to go out I didn't have time to get anything out.
No money, cards, no phone, we don't even have a way to identify ourselves.
Documentation to go to the bank and say: “My name is Yanela Tardillo, it's me,” she says and her eyes fill with tears.
Yanela, who has been in Spain for three years, is finishing the procedures to obtain the NIE and is studying to be a flight attendant, says that this morning, when she woke up in the 5-star hotel where they have been staying, she has begun to see the things of another way.
“Yesterday we were fine.
We saw the building on fire and thought: 'We're fine.'
But now I have another perspective, seeing the reality we are in.
"I don't even know what to think about first."
“A day before,” she continues, “we were in our room, in our house, and now I can't even imagine that we no longer have it.”
There is another thing, probably a coincidence, that Yanela can't get out of her head and starts telling her story out there.
Two days before the fire, while on the balcony of her house, she claims that she saw fire and police vehicles arrive on the ground floor of her building.
“I got scared, and I asked my uncle what we were doing.
And he answered me that if they didn't tell us to leave it was because they had it under control.
Not long after the moment when Carla got out of the shower and her world turned upside down, Marcos Correal, 48, CEO of a photovoltaic company and university professor, left work to go see his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife, when he received a call from a friend who told him that his building was burning.
“I thought it was an exaggeration, that some apartment had caught fire and that's it.
Immediately afterwards my wife called me, she was quite confused, on the street because it just happened that she had gone out for a walk.
But there was one person in our apartment, Luisa, our housekeeper.
I took a taxi and rushed there.
When I arrived, at a quarter to six, everything was on fire.
It hadn't reached my apartment yet and there were many fire engines.
But because of where they were placed, I remember thinking: I think they give it up and what they are doing is preventing the fire from reaching other buildings.
I was seeing everything like a movie.
"I don't think I've even come to terms with what happened yet."
Marcos Correal, affected by the fire in the apartment block in Valencia. Ignacio Zafra
His wife managed to speak on the phone with Luisa, his domestic worker.
She “she told us that Julián, the doorman, had been warning door to door.
He had taken her out of the apartment.
And between the two of them they had taken out another person who had difficulty moving who lived on our same floor.”
For a couple of hours, Marcos and his wife decided to get away from the burning building.
“We went to the Corte Inglés.
He gave me a rush and I bought a lot of clothes,” he says, dressed in one of those pale blue suits, in the hall of the Valencia Palace.
This Tuesday morning he has been speaking with his insurance and trusts that he will respond.
And he tries to rationalize what happened.
"We are alive.
Everything that has been lost is material.
Materially, there are things that we are not going to recover, due to the sentimental value they had.
And there are things that we are not going to want to recover.
For my wife, for example, when I met her I gave her a first edition of
Alice in Wonderland
, her name is Alice.
I'm not going to buy it again because she will always remind him of what happened.
And apart from that there is everything digital, the documents, the university degrees, all the information that was on the computers.
We are not going to recover all that.”
Marcos says that he bought the apartment for “something sentimental.”
About 10 years ago, at the beginning of his divorce, he was looking for an apartment.
The area didn't matter a bit.
“That day I was with my daughter, who was four or five years old.
We opened the door, the girl came in like an arrow and she started dancing in the center of the floor and I said: 'she's done, I'm not looking anymore, this is the floor.'
And we stayed there.”
Go down to the street in pajamas
José Luis Mas, a 67-year-old retired doctor, remembers the horror he experienced this Thursday, when he was at home in the building that burned in the popular neighborhood of Campanar.
“Last night you can't even imagine... Thank God, I'm a doctor and I was able to prescribe some pills to help me sleep for a while.
But bad.
And in the morning it is even worse because yesterday, with the heat of the mess, you are in
shock
and you don't realize that much, but when you see the light and reality... Finding yourself with nothing, with everything lost, is a horrible feeling.
“You see it in the movies, but you don't imagine it in reality,” he explains with his wife, Angela, 57, next to him.
They had been living in that house for three years.
His entire life was reduced to ashes in a matter of minutes.
José Luis Mas and his wife Ángela, affected by the fire in the apartment block in Valencia.Ignacio Zafra
He says that he was calmly watching a tennis match being played in Dubai with his wife on television.
“We had gotten comfortable, in our pajamas and sitting on the couch, and it started to smell like burning plastic.
My wife went to the kitchen, opened the balcony and saw enormous black smoke;
“We decided to leave.”
But she narrates everything in detail.
Smoke began to enter the house and, from his experience as a doctor at SAMU, he knew that when the smoke starts “it is normal for 10 minutes.”
"And if you inhale the smoke, well that... I said: 'Let's go, let's go.'
In fact, I'm in my pajamas, we run down, we grab the wallet with the documentation and the cell phone.
Nothing more,” he relives, his voice still broken by emotion and frustration.
As soon as he left, he called a pair of neighboring doors, but no one answered him, and the couple could not wait any longer, because the hallway was filled with thick smoke.
They were lucky that they had the only downward staircase in front of them, so they had to open it and go down seven floors.
As they looked back, everything was invaded by smoke.
More information
This was the deadly fire that destroyed 138 homes in Valencia in just one hour
Mas explains that, once on the street, he spoke with the firefighters to bring oxygen to the rescue.
“I didn't imagine the magnitude of the incident then,” he admits now.
He spoke to the police so that they could ask the Emergency Coordination Center that the SAMU not only bring basic life support (BLS) because things “looked ugly.”
The emergency personnel gave him oxygen.
They had inhaled gases and he also suffers from heart disease.
“It caught fire in less than 20 minutes, faster than a failure in Valencia.
I don't know the reason, but I want to create an association of affected neighbors and start working on the issue because this is very important.
A 14-story building, with 500 people inside, burns to nothing, nothing... And the air was not because if the structure is made of stone or concrete, the wind can turn the fire, but it cannot burn a building so quickly.
“That looked like cardboard.”
Hours after what happened, at the door of the hotel where they rested somewhat during the night, he explains to the media that when something similar happens, you don't believe what you're seeing, as if your head blocked it.
“Everything burns, your life, your apartment, everything.
“Everything is gone,” he says, affected.
“You buy an apartment, you start living there and you don't look, and now, in retrospect, you wonder if there were fire extinguishers in the hallways or not.
The human being does not think about death, he thinks about life and does not fall into those things when he goes to live in a house.
And he insists that it seems “strange that the building caught fire so quickly.”
So far, the numbers that are known are these: at least four dead, between 9 and 15 missing and 15 injured.
But between the misfortune of what he has lost, and the real lives that it is still not known that the tragedy has claimed, Mas explains that, although there was everything among the neighbors, many of them were healthcare professionals because the building is close from two centers: the Arnau de Vilanova public hospital and the private Vithas hospital.
Many of those who work there bought or rented at the time, when in 2008 this complex was put up for sale, consisting of two blocks of 138 homes with 14 and 10 floors, linked by a panoramic elevator.
“There are foreigners, quite a few Ukrainians and older people.
“There was everything,” he insists, remembering.
He and his wife have been saved.
But they have lost everything.