There’s a fire, let’s go!” His partner, who was videotaping their 10-month-old baby at the time, didn’t hear him and he repeated the instruction. Rafael Colomina, his partner and the baby rushed down the building’s elevator. “When we got downstairs, the tongue of fire had already reached the table where I was minutes before.” Rafael was lucky to be home that day. “Normally at that time I’m in the gym, but that Thursday I was on the terrace and I noticed the stench”, he explains. “When I went out the second time, I already saw the fire and we ran out.” He explains how pieces of the facade were coming up and how he realized that it was starting to be dangerous for his family.
Yesterday he was trying to reorganize his life. The judge investigating the fire in the two buildings in the Campanar neighborhood authorized the entry of residents into their flats. He did it after the National Police announced that this measure does not affect the investigation into the incident. Likewise, the instructor has already received the results of the laboratory analyzes carried out by the scientific police to fully identify the ten fatalities, and has sent them to the Institute of Forensic Medicine to be compared.
The court will contact the relatives of the deceased so that they can collect the personal effects and will then authorize the delivery of the remains and the issuance of the corresponding burial and cremation licenses for the celebration of the funerals.
Meanwhile, those who survived the fire are trying to start over. While he waits for them to let him up, Rafael also waits for the call to resettle in the Safranar building where some of his neighbors are already settled. He hopes to do it soon to start “putting his life back together”. Since Thursday, he has been sleeping on a sofa bed at a friend’s house and has been coming and going in search of answers. “We used to have a home, a neighborhood, and now we have nothing.”
At the moment there are 21 adults and 11 children rehoused in the building enabled by Valencia City Council, which has 131 properties, the rest who have requested it will arrive during this week. At the entrance to the building, someone has hung a children’s drawing that reads “Cheers”. It welcomes families like that of Ani Pérez, who is waiting with her son, Mauri Morales, for the call from the Consistory to settle there. “These are days of many diligences, but we are very grateful”, explains Ani, a Colombian with Spanish nationality whom the Colombian consul called on the first day to help her with “everything she needed. It was very nice.”
He reasons with the journalists at the doors of the building while dozens of workers enter and leave. The truck carrying new mattresses maneuvers to get onto the sidewalk while Red Cross volunteers, municipal officials and SAUS (Social Emergency Service) psychologists move through the area. Meanwhile, Mauri explains that he found out about the fire through a call from a relative and that he was standing in front of the roundabout, he couldn’t believe that those flames came from his house, where he had been living for rent for a year decade “In an hour, our photos of 25 years have been burned. Everything has gone to waste”, he explains calmly and soothingly, admirable after what he has been through. Their partner watches them closely. It was she who called him on Thursday to reassure him and tell him that she was already with her mother on the street, while the building was burning. “A while ago I brought them the family albums of a lifetime from Colombia… and they have stayed there. There is nothing,” recalls the woman, who welcomes the mother and son into her home these days, worried about how they will manage what they have experienced. Normalizing what is abnormal, because their reality a week ago was different, is the message that the volunteers insist on conveying.
They talk to them and accompany them, as some victims of the Grenfell buildings fires, in 2017 in London, and of Torre dei Moro in Milan, in 2021, also did on Monday afternoon, who also visited their new neighborhood to give I support them. In the morning, Mauri and Ani finally go up to see the flats, with two and three bedrooms, accompanied by municipal technicians. “It’s much more than we were expecting”, they comment when they get off. Still excited, they say they are “very grateful”.
