By BBC News World
Feb 23, 2024, 11:16 PM EST
At least 9 people died in a raging fire that in a few hours completely destroyed a residential building in the Spanish city of Valencia this Thursday.
According to the local press, four of the victims were members of the same family: the father, the mother, a 3-year-old girl and a newborn.
Previously, the Government Delegation in the Valencian Community spoke of 10 fatalities, but the National Police said this Friday that the official figure is 9, the other person is considered missing.
The fire began on Thursday around 5:00 p.m. local time (4:00 p.m. GMT) on the eighth floor of a building in the Campanar neighborhood of Spain’s third largest city and then It spread quickly, fueled by the wind blowing in the area.
Some experts said the building was covered with a highly flammable polyurethane coatingwhich could explain the rapid spread, although the authorities have not yet commented on the matter.
At the time of the fire, Valencia was experiencing gusts of wind up to 60 kilometers per houraccording to the national meteorological office Aemet.
A man who lived on the second floor of the building told the television channel La Sexta that the flames advanced quickly. “The fire spread in a matter of 10 minutes,” he said.
The block, which was composed of two joined towers of 138 apartmentsthis Friday dawned completely charred and small columns of smoke still rise above it.
Videos of the event show the homes being consumed by flames and large clouds of black smoke enveloping the construction.
Escaping the flames
The most dramatic scenes occurred while firefighters used a crane to remove a father and his daughter from a balcony where they were trapped in an operation broadcast live on national television.
Other images showed a man jumping several floors on an inflatable mat to escape the flames.
The towers remained completely burned out and you can see the skeleton of the construction. Firefighters have been working to cool the housing block and make way for the scientific police, who entered the building throughout Friday morning.
“We are trying to cool the façade. That is our objective in the next few hours,” said the deputy director of emergencies, Jorge Suárez.
Esther Puchades, vice president of the College of Industrial Technical Engineers of Valencia, told the Spanish news agency Efe that she had previously inspected the building.
He explained that its exterior featured a polyurethane material, which is no longer widely used for fear of flammability. The block It also had an aluminum cover.
“The reason for which [el edificio] it burned so fast “It is because of this type of coating,” he told the Spanish media.
Among the injured are a child, several adults and several firefighters, most of them affected by smoke inhalation.
Six of them were still in the hospital on Friday, but their lives were not in danger, said the region’s president, Carlos Mazón.
The images showed how some residents They asked for help from the balconies of their apartments.
Ana María González, an employee at a nearby clinic, told RTVE that she could see firefighters working to rescue a teenager trapped on the first floor of the building.
“Finding everything lost is horrible,” José Luis Mas, one of the residents of the block that was engulfed in flames last night, explained to the newspaper Levante, at the doors of the SH Palace hotel, which has been hosting since Thursday night some of the neighbors who lost their homes.
“Starting life again is very difficult because, In a month, no one will remember us”, he commented.
The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, said he was “shocked by the terrible fire” and contacted the mayor and the regional president “to offer them all the help that is necessary.”
On Friday morning he had already arrived at the area of the tragedy.
“On behalf of the Spanish government and I believe that of Spanish society as a whole, we want to express our solidarity, love and empathy to the families of the victims of this terrible fire,” he said.
Valencia announced three days of mourning and suspended the start of an annual month-long festival.