“They were cries of burning, not of asking for help.” A short and chilling sentence that sums up the tragedy experienced yesterday morning in the center of Vigo. This is how a witness described, with a broken voice, the moments after the start of the fire, which is believed to have been provoked, which caused the death of 30-year-old Roxana and three of her children, Aldara, Sara and Ezequiel, aged between 11 and 14. Nine other people were injured, two of them very seriously.
A fire that, once the flames were extinguished, uncovered many, not to say too much, miseries. The three children were already in the spotlight of the administration due to suspicions of a life in very difficult conditions, in a building where conflicts and problems were repeated every day.
But no one had taken them out of this house – on the fourth floor of the building – even though they lived, neighbors say, without electricity or running water. This is confirmed by the councilor for Social Policy: “We knew the family, it has an open social history” and she was also aware of this reality – despite the fact that prominent relatives of the family assure that the parents “deprived themselves of their children” – the guardianship service of minors of the Xunta de Galicia.
Residents of this street had also alerted the municipal authorities of the problems generated by some of the thirty people who live in the building, most of them in occupied flats. Days and weeks ago, other fires had been caused. To this must be added the threat of a problematic tenant of the building, expelled by other inhabitants of the building. When this man left – we will have to wait to find out if he has anything to do with this fire – he shouted for everyone to hear: “This will not be the last. If I don’t live here, no one lives there”, according to El Faro de Vigo. This squatter, identified for drug trafficking, would have caused, according to the same information, one of the previous fires on the fifth floor.
The question, in view of so many nonsense, falls under its own weight. Could this tragedy have been avoided if social services had acted more quickly in view of the indicators of abandonment of these children? Although the answer doesn’t really matter now. It is too late to repair the damage. This is how several residents of the neighborhood and survivors of the fire expressed themselves yesterday to the Government delegate, Pedro Blanco, during a visit to the area. “Where were the social services? Now that there are dead children, come”, they reprimanded him. The visit of the mayor, Abel Caballero, was calmer.
The family affected by this tragedy lived by collecting scrap metal. And it would be the least problematic in the building. Only the father, known as Potito, and a fourth son, aged eight, were saved. They were able to be rescued from a firemen’s ladder for hanging from a window. The mother and the other three children would have suffocated to death after leaving the flat and running up the stairs.
Investigators are now trying to confirm whether the last fire was also caused. It is known that it started on the ground floor and some neighbors talk about two outbreaks: one at the entrance of the building and another on the fifth floor. The rapid combustion of the large amount of utensils accumulated in the building – the Council knew this from reports from the Fire Department which warned that it was a gunpowder – caused a thick plume of smoke and the staircase acted as a chimney through which they escaped the lethal gases that killed Roxana and her three children.
Yesterday, many witnesses and residents of the affected building agreed to report that the firefighters arrived too late, something that is denied by the body, which assures that the first vehicles arrived in a matter of minutes. However, the wait became eternal. The first to appear were some police units, but the officers could not do much from the street even with fire extinguishers. Some neighbors, those who live on the lowest floors, jumped out of the windows with their children in their arms. Others locked themselves in the floors and were rescued using ladders by the Fire Department, and the first responders were able to escape that hell by the stairs.
The general feeling, after the moments of anxiety and terror and now without smoke, was the majority in Carrer Alfons X el Savi: this tragedy was an announced chronicle.
