The ten who died in the fire that devastated a housing complex in Valencia on Thursday lived on the eighth and ninth floors.
They are the floors higher than the point where the fire started, on the seventh, for reasons currently unknown.
The two floors became a mousetrap between the voracity of the flames and the suffocating smoke that, in a few minutes, invaded the two blocks of 14 and 10 floors in which the 138 homes were distributed.
This Saturday, the scientific police located a tenth body, the one that was missing until the list of missing persons was completed.
Even so, the Government delegate in the Valencian Community, Pilar Bernabé, assured that she will continue searching to raise “inch by inch” a building of which barely the structure and rubble remain.
“I need to think that we are not going to find more,” Barnabas wished.
Fortunately, at the time the fire started, at 5:30 p.m., many of the more than 400 inhabitants of the complex were not in their homes.
Others perceived the flames and smoke in time and left the building.
Some more were notified by the janitor, who urged and helped them to go down to the street.
A couple was rescued by firefighters from a balcony, after two hours of agonizing waiting, when the troops had already reached the balconies of the lowest floors with stairs through which they freed a neighbor.
Some even used the elevator to get to the ground floor and escape the fire.
But ten did not make it out.
They were all on the upper floors.
The fire chief of the Valencia City Council, Enrique Chisbert, has defended the actions of his colleagues, which has also been praised by the representatives of all the institutions.
“We saw firefighters who thought that at that moment they were saying goodbye to their work and even their lives,” said Pilar Bernabé.
The Valencia City Council, chaired by María José Catalá, approved an institutional declaration in which it appreciates the “dedication and selflessness” of the security and emergency bodies and services and, “very especially”, that of the firefighters.
One of them, who was injured, saw the fire approaching especially closely and asked his companions, through his
walkie talkie
and with a broken voice, to say goodbye to his wife, to tell her that he loved her.
But the work of the firefighters is also being questioned because on the highest floors, some firefighters recommended not leaving the homes.
“Homes are the safest place if the building guarantees sectorization conditions, while we can extinguish the fire,” said the Fire Chief.
“We follow the usual protocol.
For homes that are in danger, if they go into the stairwell to evacuate in a building with smoke, what we always recommend is that [the neighbors] stay in their homes.
If there are sectorization conditions, it is the best.
The opposite can be a disorderly evacuation that can cause multiple victims,” he maintained.
The work on the building devastated by fire was completed in 2008. The project was covered by the 1996 fire protection regulations, since the new regulations had not come into force when it was carried out.
The later rules are more restrictive and require that sectorization that the fire chief spoke of, which seeks to prevent the fire from jumping from one floor to another and that there be watertight compartments in the stairs, which must be separated from the homes by a door.
The “operational procedure for intervention in fires in high-rise buildings” of the firefighters mentioned by Chisbert states that in the city of Valencia there are more than 100 buildings with more than 15 floors “for the purposes of a possible intervention in fire.”
The document also indicates its age and the indicative data "to know what regulations were applied to it with regard to fire safety."
The 14-story building that burned in Campanar is not listed, so before arriving, the firefighters could not know its characteristics.
Nor how much was the south wind that was blowing virulently in the area where the property is located going to accelerate the fire.
“I think that the behavior of the fire has been seen all over the world, you can draw your conclusions, it spread at a very great speed,” argued the Fire Chief.
The protocol does set out the main objectives and actions in order of priority, “although they do not always follow the same sequential order in their resolution”: “ensure the safety of those involved;
rescue of people;
rescue of animals and material goods;
fire control and extinction, ventilation of smoke and fire gases;
cutoff of affected supplies (gas, electricity, water);
inspection of homes, premises and affected areas;
protection of the work area and surroundings;
verification of the complete extinction of the fire by using the thermal viewer to rule out hidden sources”, are part of the first positions on the list.
“The fellow firefighters, obviously, as is normal, were taking risks even beyond our capabilities throughout the intervention.
I wouldn't like it to be a
show
ago , but the first crews suffered the danger very closely,” Chisbert maintained.
One of his troops remains hospitalized, although his life is not in danger.
Another was discharged this Saturday.
Those who also continued working were the forensic experts from the Institute of Legal Medicine who analyzed, in collaboration with the National Police, the ten corpses for the full identification of all the deceased and their autopsies.
Four of them correspond to a family made up of a couple and their two children, three years old and barely a week old.
Also that of a woman, already retired, who leaves two children.
The identification phase of the victims is a complex task since, depending on the state of the corpses, comparison with DNA tests from relatives is required, to do so with all the guarantees.
Once the forensic reports are complete, they will be sent to the Investigative Court number 10 of Valencia where the proceedings and investigation are carried out to clarify the facts and determine whether there has been any type of negligence.
Valencia fell silent this Saturday at 12:00, with the celebration of a minute of silence in the Plaza del Ayuntamiento and another in the roundabout that exists in front of the building, called by the failures of the sector, which have focused on the collection of clothing, food , school supplies and hygiene products, among others, everything that the other victims may need, all those who have been left without housing and, in some cases, without even documentation.
The president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, participated in the “official” minute of silence;
the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá;
the Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morant;
the Government delegate in the Valencian Community, Pilar Bernabé,ç;
and the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo.
Julián, the caretaker of the residential complex who has collaborated with the police in identifying missing persons and victims, was also there.
He also helped rescue neighbors: “I did everything in my power, until the smoke left me,” he said.
“It's very hard, it's very hard to see all that, the truth is, it's very hard,” he lamented.
At the informal event, falleros, neighbors and onlookers gave thunderous applause after the silence, but practically no one moved even several minutes later, shocked by the black mass that the building has become and the surrounding streets in which it still smells. to smoke.
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