Her name is Patricia and when we talk to her she is packing the last belongings that neighbors in the neighborhood have donated to be delivered to the families who have been left with nothing. “We are finishing, we have told people not to give us more things; the solidarity is impressive.” We are talking about the Campanar neighborhood, the urban geography where a building fire occurred last Thursday, causing 10 deaths and hundreds of people injured. Families that have lost everything.
Patricia is young and on Thursday she saw live the evolution of flames that in a few minutes spread through two towers of the same building. “That was not normal, what they put there in the construction burned like a failure,” she says, indignant. This is the same thing that Mónica, owner of the pharmacy located in front of the damaged building, points out. “What happened is incredible, we can’t stop talking about it, we’ve all seen a fire in an apartment and that doesn’t happen,” she says. Many residents of the burned-out towers shopped at her pharmacy: “we know many of them, even some of those who are said to have died.”
The Campanar neighborhood was, not long ago, an orchard before the real estate boom devastated it with middle and upper-middle class properties. Its buildings are tall, of good quality, many with swimming pools and sports areas; Prestigious health centers are located there, such as the Valencian Infertility Institute, IVI. On the ground floor there are dealerships for luxury car brands and high-end motorcycles. The damaged building was one of those considered luxury, and is located in the heart of the neighborhood.
But Campanar is also an organized neighborhood, with a social fabric that has been mobilized, especially through its Fallas commissions. One of these commissions is collecting solidarity aid when we approach their streets. There are several women, dressed in their sweatshirts with the color red and the name of the falla. “We are here collecting help, we are going to take it to the people who need it.” Do you know some of the affected families? “Yes, and what happened to them is hard, but even more so to see how it happened, let’s hope it is well investigated.”
Rubén is a “boomer” and runs a bar in front of the scene of the accident. He says that as soon as the fire started he started recording it with his mobile phone and that he started passing it on to friends. “That’s outrageous, someone put a material in there that burned like it was paper; we couldn’t believe how fast it was.” In his bar, he says, many neighbors gathered for hours to follow the terrifying fire live. “There was a moment when we were all crying, there were ten dead but hundreds could have died.”
While we walk through the neighborhood we ask people who are approaching if they live in the area. Most say no. What they do is take out their mobile phone to take photos of the damaged building. This is what is called disaster tourism.
To try to get the neighborhood back to normal, the cleaning teams of the Valencia City Council yesterday carried out a first cleaning of the areas required by firefighters so that they can carry out their work with a crane, preventing them from puncture the crane vehicles.
The surrounding roadway was also cleaned with two auto buckets, a sweeper, a collector, a pressure washer and 14 cleaning workers who, for approximately four and a half hours, collected 4,110 threads of waste.
