Carla Ahumada, Chilean, 35 years old, and Yanela Tartillo, Peruvian, 21, seem to have gotten lost this Wednesday in the hall of the Valencia Palace, one of the hotels in the city that have offered people their home in the wilderness have lost urgent shelter fire that destroyed a huge building on Maestro Rodrigo Avenue on Tuesday. “I was just getting out of the shower when I noticed the smell. I told my friend who went to look at the balcony and when he came back he said to me: “Go out, go out, go out!” I grabbed the cell phone and left the house in a towel, half naked , almost without clothes. When we got downstairs we found people crying, people trying to go back inside to get their pets, and I had a panic attack,” says Carla. “I was in Spain for four days and lost everything. My passport, my clothes… All my clothes are donated. I never thought it would be like this.”
Yanela Tardillo, Peruvian, 21 years old, niece of Carla's boyfriend, was in the same apartment at the time and was listening to music on headphones. “At first we thought the smell was coming from our house because it was very strong. My uncle went out onto the terrace, I looked out with him and we saw the fire alive and the police shouting from the street: “Down, down, down!” Due to the desperation to go out, I didn't have time to take anything out. No money, no cards, no phone, we don't even have the option to identify ourselves. Documents to go to the bank and say, “My name is Yanela Tardillo, it’s me,” she says, her eyes filling with tears.
Yanela, who has been in Spain for three years, completing the procedures to obtain the NIE and training to be a flight attendant, says that this morning when she woke up in the 5-star hotel where they were staying, she said this started to see things differently. “We were fine yesterday. We saw the building burning and thought, “We're fine.” But now I have a different perspective and see the reality we're in. I don't know what to think of first.†“The day before,†he continues, “we were in our room, in our house, and now I can’t even imagine not having it anymore .”
There is another thing, probably a coincidence, that Yanela can't get out of her head and that's where she starts telling her story. Two days before the fire, he claimed to have seen fire and police vehicles arriving on the ground floor of his property from the balcony of his house. “I got scared and asked my uncle what we were doing. And he replied that if they didn't tell us to get out, it was because they had it under control.
Marcos Correal, affected by the fire in the apartment block in Valencia. Ignacio Zafra
Not long after Carla got out of the shower and her world was turned upside down, Marcos Correal, 48, CEO of a photovoltaic company and university professor, left work to visit his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife. He received a call from a friend who told him his building was on fire. “I thought it was exaggerated, that some floor had caught fire and that was it.” Immediately afterwards my wife called me, she was quite confused, on the street because she happened to be 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 on duty. But I remember thinking because of the placement there: I think they're giving it up as lost, and what they're doing is preventing the fire from reaching other buildings. I saw everything like a movie. I don’t think I’ve even processed what happened yet.”
What influences the most is what happens next. To make sure you don't miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe to
His wife managed to make a phone call to Luisa, their domestic worker. “He told us that Julián, the bouncer, had warned door to door. He had taken her out of the apartment. And between the two of them, they had taken out another person who was having difficulty moving around and was living on the same floor as us.”
For a few hours, Marcos and his wife decided to escape the burning building. “We went to the Corte Inglés. “I got angry and bought a lot of clothes,” he says, dressed in one of those light blue suits in the hall of the Valencia Palace. This Tuesday morning he spoke to his insurance company and trusts that they will respond. And try to rationalize what happened. “We live. Everything that has been lost is material. Materially speaking, there are things that we will not get back because of the sentimental value they had. And there are things we don't want to restore. For my wife, for example, when I met her I gave her a first edition of Alice in Wonderland, her name is Alice. I won't buy it again because it will always remind him of what happened. And otherwise everything is digital, the documents, the university degrees, all the information that would be on the computers. We will not restore any of this.”
Marcos says he bought the apartment “for sentimental reasons.” About 10 years ago, at the beginning of his divorce, he was looking for an apartment. The area didn't matter at all. “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 started dancing in the middle of the apartment and I said, “That's it, I'm not looking anymore, that's the apartment.” And we stayed there.”
Go out on the street in your pajamas
José Luis Mas, a 67-year-old retired doctor, remembers the horror he experienced this Thursday when he was at home in the burning building in the popular Campanar neighborhood. “You can't imagine last night… Thank God, I'm a doctor and was able to prescribe some pills to help me sleep for a while. But bad. And in the morning it's even worse, because yesterday, in the heat of chaos, you're in shock and you don't notice it so much anymore, but when you see the light and reality… yourself with nothing, with everything What is lost is a terrible feeling. “You see it in the cinema, but you don't imagine it in reality,” he explains, with his wife Ángela, 57, at his side. They had lived in this 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 and his wife were quietly watching a tennis match in Dubai on television. “We were comfortable in our pajamas and sitting on the couch and it started to smell like burning plastic. My wife went into the kitchen, opened the balcony and saw huge black smoke; We decided to go.†But he tells everything in detail. Smoke began to enter the house and from his experience as a doctor at SAMU, he knew that “the normal time is 10 minutes” when the smoke starts. “And when you inhale the smoke, then… I said, 'Let's go, let's go.' Actually, I'm in my pajamas, we run downstairs, we grab the wallet with the documents and the cell phone. Nothing more,” he still comes to life, his voice broken with emotion and frustration. As soon as he left, he called two neighboring doors, but no one answered, and the couple could wait no longer because the hallway was filled with thick smoke. They were lucky that the only downward staircase was in front of them, so they had to open it and go down seven floors. When they looked back, everything was surrounded by smoke.
More information
Mas explains that when he was on the street, he spoke to the firefighters to bring oxygen to the rescue. “I couldn’t imagine the extent of the incident at the time,” he admits today. He spoke to police so they could ask the Emergency Coordination Center that SAMU not bring just basic life support (BLS) because things were “looking ugly.” The rescue personnel provided him with oxygen. They had inhaled gases and he also suffers from heart disease. “It caught fire in less than 20 minutes, faster than an outage 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 it is very important. A 14-story building containing 500 people burns down to nothing, to nothing… And the air did not burn, because if the structure is made of stone or concrete, the wind can ignite the fire, but a building cannot burn down so quickly. “It looked like cardboard.”
Hours after what happened, he explained to the media at the door of the hotel where they were resting overnight that when something similar happens, you don't believe what you see, as if your head had blocked it. “Everything is burning, your life, your apartment, everything. “Everything is gone,” he comments affectedly. “You buy an apartment, start living there and don't look, and now you ask yourself afterwards whether there were fire extinguishers in the hallways or not.” People don't think about death, they think about life and don't decay into these things when he moves into a house. And he insists it “seems strange that the building caught fire so quickly”.
So far the following figures are known: There are at least five dead, between 9 and 15 missing and 15 injured. But between the unhappiness of what he lost and the actual lives that the tragedy still remains unknown, Mas explains that although everything was among the neighbors, many of them were healthcare workers because the building was in the There are two centers nearby: the public hospital Arnau de Vilanova and the private Vithas hospital. Many of those who work there bought or rented back when this complex, which consisted of two blocks of 138 houses of 14 and 10 floors and connected by a panoramic elevator, was put up for sale in 2008. “There are foreigners, a lot of Ukrainians and older people. “It was all there,” he remembers. He and his wife were saved. But they lost everything.