“The neighbor’s child was screaming for help. I looked out but there was too much smoke. We could not do anything”. The testimony, between sobs, to the Valencian television of Sira Frías, the neighbor who lived door to door in the family that died yesterday in the fire in their home, denotes the helplessness and fear suffered by the 120 neighbors to whom the alarm of fires woke them up from sleep last Monday morning in La Vila Joiosa. Sira was barely able to notify her husband and flee the flames with her granddaughter.
Ronela, another of the affected neighbors who spoke to the media, explained the difficulties in getting to safety. “The fire alarm woke me up. “I couldn’t get out, I was desperate and I had to stay until the firefighters took me out.”
An overload in a socket in the living room caused the fire, as explained by the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, who thanked the Civil Guard for the speed in clarifying the causes of the fire. Despite the speed of the intervention of the Local Police and the firefighters, nothing could be done to save the life of a woman, her son and her grandson, barely five years old, who lived at door 52 of the 11th floor.
The fire occurred around 2:30 a.m., in a house located on Avenida dels Mariners number 1 in the La Cala de la Vila Joiosa urbanization (Alicante), specifically in tower 3 of a 24-story building. The three victims join the 10 who lost their lives in the fatal fire in the Campanar neighborhood, which brings to 13 the number of people who died due to fire in their homes in just 11 days.
To find a similar figure we have to go to the year 2022 where a fire in a nursing home in Moncada caused the death of nine residents.
However, the La Vila Joiosa fire was not as atypical as the Campanar fire and behaved, the firefighters explain, in a more usual way. The Valencian president himself explained that the concrete and bricks of the façade prevented “a rapid spread” of the fire in the building. Quite the opposite of what happened less than two weeks ago in the fire in the Campanar neighborhood where the flames escalated throughout the façade and burned both the building where the fire broke out and the adjacent one.
As this newspaper has published, in this case, the façade materials were key in the immediate expansion of the fire, also caused by an electrical failure. It is suspected that during construction some type of component of the façade cladding could have been changed, since, according to the approved project, it should have been raised by a sandwich formed by two aluminum plates with a rock wool coating, which is totally fireproof. However, the architects and specialists consulted point out that the quality of the materials was decisive in the escalation of the flames.
This did not happen in La Vila Joiosa where the fire was located in the house where it was declared. In fact, all the neighbors, except Sira’s family who were relocated to a local hotel – the Generalitat Valenciana has already announced that it will make housing available to them – were able to return to their homes yesterday.
Despite the “devilish” time – in the words of the Valencian president – ??the rest of the homes were able to be evacuated. Mazón explained that the evacuation was not “necessary from a technical point of view,” but it was decided to do it for “greater peace of mind for the neighbors.” And the stories of those who were trapped by the earthquake still resonate in the minds of all Valencians. the flames in Campanar.
