A huge fireball illuminated the Murcian night sky announcing the tragedy minutes before dawn. It had already passed six in the morning when the usual celebrations in the clubs in the Atalayas nightlife area came to an abrupt halt and gave way to chaos: people running, coughing, screaming and anguish over the spread of a fire that affected three venues. adjacent: Fonda Milagros, Teatre and Golden, on Isla Cristina Street in Murcia, and which left 13 people dead after exhausting and complex search efforts to try to locate the 15 missing persons counted by the investigators, among whom would be the deceased. Until this Sunday, 18 were missing, but early this Monday three people were found alive who were in another place without coverage.
The fire, which started for reasons that are still under investigation, began, according to police sources, in the Fonda de los Milagros and quickly spread through the upper floor to the two adjacent nightclubs: Teatre and Golden. The flames caused the structure to collapse on the first floor of the Fonda, where the 13 recovered bodies were found, of which three could be identified through fingerprints, while the other ten will have to wait for the comparison of the blood samples. DNA.
According to the National Police, the temperature inside the nightclub could reach between 1,000 and 1,500 degrees Celsius.
The mayor of Murcia, José Ballesta, confirmed that search efforts continue in other areas affected by the fire to find the rest of the missing people.
Terror on a birthday
Inside Fonda Milagros, Nicaraguan Éric Hernández celebrated his 30th birthday with his brother Sergio, his mother Marta and a large group of friends and family. According to some of the witnesses who were able to leave the club in time, before the smoke and fire prevented any turning back, the party had started hours before, with a joint dinner after which this group had moved to the club. drinks After the room was evacuated, they were not heard from again. At the entrance to Isla Cristina Street, close to the police precinct, were some of his relatives, who were devastated waiting for news. In total, eight of their people were missing. Walter Hernández, one of the members of that celebration, cousin of Éric and Sergio, waited with glassy eyes for official confirmation of his fears. He avoided death by deciding to go down to have a drink on the lower floor just at the moment when the flames began to devour the boxes that this nightclub has.
The couple and Marta, Éric’s mother, and a group of friends had also disappeared, and were still on the upper floor of the nightclub when the fire caused a power outage and customers and workers began to hastily flee. Dozens of nervous people gathered at the doors of the premises. In the midst of the confusion, Walter decided to go to his house, located in the Progreso neighborhood, given the impossibility of finding his loved ones: «I took a car and they took me. “I thought I was going to find my family there, but they weren’t there,” he said. “When I called my cousin, he told me no, they hadn’t left.”
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Source: 112, National Police and Murcia City Council
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Source: 112, National Police and Murcia City Council
The fire started at
vehicles
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The fire has occurred
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volunteers from
Civil protection
Source: 112, National Police and Murcia City Council
At that moment, anguish took over him and he decided to return. «I came here to see what the situation was like. But they don’t tell us anything,” he explained anxiously just a few minutes before members of the operation deployed in the area approached him and his family and friends and asked them to accompany them to tell them the location of several bodies.
The firefighters had just managed to access the area most affected by the fire, with severe structural damage, and extract the first four bodies. It was around ten in the morning. The Emergency Coordination Center indicated that, once the fire was extinguished, the work of raiding the nightclub began, which was highly complex due to the temperature that the materials continued to retain.
The Police estimate that the interior of the nightclub could reach temperatures of between 1,000 and 1,500 degrees.
The Murcia City Council decreed three days of mourning and suspended all recreational activities in the city and all the districts. A mourning that the president of the Community, Fernando López Miras, extended to the entire Community, so the flags of public buildings in the Region of Murcia will fly at half-mast until next Wednesday, October 4.
In addition, two other people unrelated to the birthday celebration would be among the missing. One of them, a partner of the well-known Latin entertainment entertainer in Murcia, Ferney Lozano, according to eyewitnesses, as well as another woman.
In the fire, four people were affected by smoke inhalation, of which two required hospital transfer, two women and two men, between 22 and 45 years old. Many other slightly injured people, Ballesta, went to the city’s hospitals on their own.
After the recovery of the mortal remains of the deceased, members of the Homicide Group of the Murcia Police Headquarters joined in to investigate the origin of the events.
“Exhausting” extraction work
The mayor of Murcia, José Ballesta, explained that the area where the first bodies found were concentrated was in “danger of collapse”, so it had to be shored up. “The extraction work is exhausting, the firefighters go out and lie on the ground with oxygen, they have to drink water because it is a lot of work,” he said. About 40 firefighters distributed among 12 vehicles traveled to the scene of the fire. A heavy motherboard truck (BNP) was later incorporated into the work and, although the help of a helicopter from the General Directorate of Security and Emergencies was initially requested, it was ultimately not necessary. Several medical and transport ambulances from the Emergency Management and Health Emergencies were also mobilized. In addition, a total of 20 Red Cross volunteers came to assist the relatives of the missing people. Specifically, five health emergency technicians, two nurses, four psychologists, a social worker, an operator from the regional operations center and seven accompanying first responders, the NGO reported.
#Tragedy #Las #Atalayas