“Those people died because the fire was extremely virulent. Not because the firemen confined them”. A certain discomfort has spread among the fire brigade due to the criticism that some neighbors have directed against them, who considered that they did not act firmly to remove a married couple and their two children who were trapped in an apartment. According to La Vanguardia, a firefighter risked his life in this operation and informed his colleagues by radio, when he tried to climb up to rescue them even three times: “I’m dying, I’m dying” .
The body’s protocol in these cases is to keep the families in the flats if there is no option for them to leave with guarantees in the common areas, such as stairs to escape.
The affair comes at the end of the story of M. and R. and their two children, one of them a newborn. The firefighters told them that, given the virulence of the fire, to stay in their home until they could rescue them. Enrique Chisbert, head of the Valencia Fire Department, explained yesterday that the protocol of the body is for residents to stay in their homes – “they are in the safest place if the building guarantees the conditions of sectarianization” – when there is a risk in an evacuation complicated by the existence of a lot of smoke. “The opposite can be a disorderly evacuation that can cause multiple victims”, said the head of the fire department.
The criticism and what has been published have left the firefighters “devastated”. “Bringing people up the stairs with smoke and such a high temperature is crazy – they say. It’s our protocol: confine”. In fact, the other day there was another fire in another house in Valencia and when the firefighters arrived they found all the neighbors in the street. Some of them had to be treated by paramedics for smoke inhalation.
The couple and their two minor children died in the bathroom while she was saying goodbye to her mother on the phone, as a neighbor of the complex who knew the family told El Mundo. “They were talking until the signal was cut.”
