“It can be confirmed that there are four dead,” Jorge Suárez Torres, deputy emergency director for the Valencia region in eastern Spain, told reporters on Thursday evening.
“So far we have 14 people who cannot be located,” government delegate in Valencia Pilar Bernabé told public radio station RNE on Friday morning. That “number could vary,” he warned.
The mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, spoke of “between 9 and 15 people who cannot be located,” citing information from local police and residents of the building.
After the violent flames on Thursday night, the structure of two joined blocks and 138 apartments woke up on Friday like a huge charred skeleton.
The President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, who expressed himself as “shocked” on the social network X, is visiting the place this Friday.
Photo (AFP): This is what the building complex looked like this Friday after the fire.
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– “Continue cooling” –
Firefighters were only able to enter this building in the Campanar district in the morning this Friday, where the fire broke out on the fourth floor at around 5:30 p.m. on Thursday before spreading with impressive speed to the two towers of the complex apartments.
Firefighters must be careful because of the high temperatures in the building.
“Now there is also a risk that one cannot risk entering until the structure has cooled down,” as there is a risk of “an element collapsing and causing further personal injury,” warned Luis Sendra, dean of the Valencia College of Architects, to RNE.
Valencia regional president Carlos Mazón told reporters that 15 people were treated with varying degrees of injuries, including seven firefighters.
Six of those 15 people are still in hospital, but their lives are not in danger, he stressed.
The fire very quickly almost completely engulfed the building, leaving impressive images of this property in a residential area on the outskirts of Valencia completely engulfed in flames.
The property was built around 15 years ago, during the real estate boom, in which several districts of the city, which has around 800,000 inhabitants, expanded rapidly.
Several experts questioned the possible influence of insulating material applied to the facade on the rapid spread of flames, as occurred in the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London in June 2017, in which 72 people died.
In statements to Valencian regional television A Punt, vice-president of the College of Industrial Technical Engineers of Valencia, Esther Puchades, attributed the fire’s ferocity to a polyurethane coating on the facade, a highly flammable material.
Others pointed to the presence of polyethylene, the same as that used in Grenfell Tower.
According to Valencia City Council Fire Department Delegate Faustino Yanguas, “the possible material that needs to be examined,” along with the strong wind that swept across the city on Thursday afternoon, were key factors in the rapid spread of the fire.
– “Chaos” –
Enormous resources were deployed to combat the formidable flames, including the mobilization of the Military Emergency Unit.
The strong wind that hit Valencia, with gusts of between 50 and 60 km/h at the time of the fire, made extinguishing work difficult, according to the Spanish Meteorological Agency (Aemet).
A woman who owns a flower shop near the burned building told public television TVE that there were scenes of “chaos” with “traffic, police, smoke.”
Another resident of the area explained that the structure burned at an incredible rate: “It was as if the building was made of cork,” he described.
Authorities in this dynamic region of the Spanish Mediterranean ordered three days of official mourning.
In October 2023, a fire in some nightclubs in the neighboring region of Murcia claimed 13 lives and six people are charged.