Raquel Coquard was traveling with her partner and two children, ages six and eight, on Sunday on the Tomahawk, the roller coaster that crashed into a tree that had fallen due to the wind in Port Aventura. “The wind was very strong that morning,” she remembers.
In the first two seats of the car were Raquel’s two children. Right behind, in the second row, Raquel, 40, and her partner, Martí Guasteví, 46.
“In the final part of the ride we clearly saw that a tree had fallen on the tracks, all of us who were on the roller coaster saw it and we started screaming,” Coquard recalls. He estimates that they saw the tree down when it was “about eight meters away, it was already down, we didn’t see it fall, and the truck didn’t stop.”
After seeing the tree and screaming, they tried to protect themselves as best they could from the impact with the branches. The passengers who suffered the worst were those who, like their partner, were in the seats on the right side of the roller coaster due to the position in which the tree and branches were left.
Martí was treated at the Sant Joan hospital in Reus and was diagnosed with a fracture in a vertebra. He was discharged on Sunday, but was admitted again to the Clínic hospital on Monday. He has a bruise on his throat that prevents him from swallowing and he can barely speak. He will be hospitalized for several days.
Two other passengers remain hospitalized in serious condition in Bellvitge and the Joan XXIII hospital.
Raquel’s daughter was another of the 14 people injured, slightly, with three stitches on her forehead and wounds on her face. In addition to the pain of the wounds and the emotional impact, with her partner unconscious and bleeding – “I thought he was dead” – Raquel and her family are very hurt by the treatment they received at Port Aventura. “They haven’t called me yet, they offered on the first day, although with terrible attention, but afterwards they haven’t followed up. My children are six and eight years old, and my partner entered again, but no one has called us,” she insists.
They did receive a call on Monday from the Mossos d’Esquadra to go and testify at the police station as direct witnesses of what happened. Also the rest of the passengers.
Everyone has joined in a WhatsApp group. They have not decided the specific steps they are going to take. “It’s early, but I would have appreciated the help of the park and had the best time possible, before taking action, which obviously we will do. I think we will all come together, we are just as hurt, we feel anger at the lack of attention.” Raquel adds that when they arrived back at the attraction’s exit point, the employees didn’t know anything. “What happened?” they asked us.
