The Valencia Fire Chief, Enrique Chisbert, revealed this Tuesday before the judge that the ladder of the first truck that came to extinguish the fire in the building in the Valencian neighborhood of Campanar, in which 10 people ended up dying, did not work. The vehicle arrived at 5:44 p.m., according to Chisbert, just ten minutes after the first call. The victims’ lawyers believe that this ruling could have delayed the extinguishing of the fire.
Chisbert has assured that there is a report, to which they have not had access to the accusations, which details how their task occurred. The first call alerting about the fire occurred at 5:34 p.m., in a notice that reported a fire on a fourth floor and not on an eighth, which was the floor on which the flames originated, according to the fire chief. who has claimed not to know why the failure occurred in the staircase.
The investigating court number 9 of Valencia investigates the caseor in response to complaints filed by relatives of the deceased and some victims who consider that, in principle, serious negligence occurred.
The firefighter has focused his story on two other issues: facade materials and the collapse that occurred in the emergency staircase much earlier than expected. Regarding the virulence with which the ventilated façade – built with aluminum panels and an insulator that are currently not permitted – burned, he alleged that these caused the rapid spread of the fire until it became an “inextinguishable” fire, as he said. Furthermore, he explained that the emergency staircase which, according to the regulations in force when the building was built, had to last two hours to facilitate evacuation, collapsed at 6:20 p.m., less than an hour after the fire started. Thus, the smoke and gases prevented firefighters from using this route to save the neighbors.
The fire chief has defended, as he did days after the incidentthe actions of the firefighters and the intervention protocol which, as he said then, marks that the upper floors “are the safest place if the building guarantees the conditions of sectorization and we can extinguish the fire” as he said after it was questioned the work of some officers who asked the victims not to leave their homes and ended up dying. “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 then. Furthermore, this Tuesday he recalled that there were also injured firefighters and announced that a a study to find out what can be improved.
Another of the facts revealed before the judge is that calls were made from six different homes to 112 once the fire started. The victims’ lawyers have requested a list of these calls in order to know the times at which they were made since, in some cases, due to the messages sent to some relatives, it is known that there were deceased people who communicated with the outside world. until nine at night. The victims’ relatives want the court to also investigate whether until that time nothing could be done to save their lives.
