Among the tenants there were many foreigners; Police are trying to determine whether or not they were at the house on the fateful night.
Photo: REUTERS
A large fire in Valencia, Spain, is the main topic of all the local media. Two residential buildings (one of them 14 stories) burned like matches in just three hours. At least four people died and fifteen were missing. The fire instantly spread throughout the façade. The preliminary cause of the tragedy has been named.
Juan Luis López works in the house next door. “I can’t understand how a new building can burn like this in 2024?! After all, they use modern technologies… I hope that now builders will reconsider their standards”…
The first call about the fire came to the control panel at 5:35 p.m. At nine at night both houses were on fire. The rubble on the upper floors may contain the remains of those who did not manage to escape (there were more than a hundred apartments in the complex), writes El País.
Among the victims were five firefighters, one of whom had to jump from the seventh floor onto a mat spread by his colleagues below. They couldn’t use the inflatable structures; Burning debris flew from above.
According to the doorman, the fire started when the curtains in one of the apartments caught fire. The teenagers Carlos and Dani were walking through the park opposite and in a few minutes they saw the flames cover the entire façade: “It passed through the aluminum plates or behind them and rushed upwards.”
The burned skyscrapers were built in the early 2000s. Engineer and expert in the installation of building structures David Higuera states: according to all indications, the cause of the rapid spread of the fire was the façade material: double coated plates aluminum with resins inside. The second factor is floors made of flammable materials.
Firefighters are now cooling the remains of the building to begin searching for remains inside. Among the tenants there were many foreigners; Police are trying to determine whether or not they were at the house on the fateful night.
