Marc, 33, said goodbye to his wife and daughters like any other weekday morning. Last Tuesday, his wife carried the little girl—just a few weeks old—they had recently had in a baby carrier. The woman took the couple's other daughter by the hand and went out into the street. Marc stayed a few minutes alone in ground floor 3 of number 9 Canigó Street in Badalona. Without the girls at home, he took the opportunity to connect to a work video call. Minutes before 10:30 the communication was cut short. The building collapsed. Marc's wife was in the street and started screaming. Marc was buried by tons of debris. The judge lifted his body this Wednesday. The young man is one of the three killed in an accident that has shocked the entire city.
The odd sidewalk on Canigó Street is made up of modest apartments built in 1959 and which served, during the Franco regime, to house police officers assigned to Badalona. Today they live in hardworking and humble families who a generation ago left the rural areas of Andalusia, Extremadura… and settled in Catalonia looking for work. Number 9 (like the rest of the blocks) has five floors and four floors per landing. The mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, revealed this Wednesday that the main hypothesis that researchers are considering is that the collapse is due to the “poor quality of materials” in the roof of one of the attics. Precisely in the attic the incident began, the dining room floor and part of a room collapsed and fell. The detachment took away the dining rooms and bedrooms on the floors of the third doors (attic 3, 3rd 3rd, 2nd 3rd, 1st 3rd and lower 3rd) and part of the fourth doors. The façade of the building was left intact. Another hypothesis they are investigating is whether the floor of the attic where the incident began was overloaded with some material. Be that as it may, the sinking took Marc with it, but also María and Diana, the other two who died.
Juanma is a former military man who rented, a few months ago, a room on the 2nd 1st. “He was hanging out the clothes when I heard a noise, first like a storm and then like an earthquake. From here, chaos came,” he recalls. This Tuesday he slept in a hostel in Barcelona. He waits on the street to see if he will be able to pick up his belongings along with the rest of the neighbors at number 9. His roommate is Juan Recaray, who has been living in that house for 14 years. “We went out to the stairs and only screams could be heard. We went straight to the street,” he remembers. Since Tuesday, Recay has not seen María, the neighbor from 1st 3rd. She is another of the deceased. María was at her house at the time the accident took place. Her family and her ex-husband, Estéfano, gathered this Wednesday in front of the Raval center – the municipal offices where information is transferred to those affected -, remembered her and mourned her. “My sister had been living in that apartment for more than 20 years. It is the saddest way to die,” lamented the brother of the deceased. Maria was 55 years old. All the neighbors on the street know perfectly well who she is. She had a back problem that prevented her from walking normally. “My sister was selling coupons for many years. She won't be able to do it anymore,” cries the brother of the deceased.
Albiol assures that the building had passed the technical inspection of the Generalitat in January and yesterday announced the creation of an advisory service to which residents who have any type of problem can contact “even with their insurance.” Firefighters plan to finish clearing the debris this Wednesday. “I am concerned that this similar situation could be found in other homes in the area, which are from the same development. We will evaluate and act,” Albiol assessed, pointing to the rest of the blocks where police officers were installed during the Franco era.
Diana, 40 years old, lived in the 2nd and 3rd. This Russian-born English teacher had only rented the apartment where she lost her life a year and a half ago. On Tuesday she accompanied her 10 and 12 year old daughters to school and returned home. In the afternoon, no one went to look for them after school. EL PAÍS has contacted Klimentii, Diana's boyfriend – also Russian -. “On Tuesday the girls ended up sleeping at the house of one of their friends from school. This morning I went to school to, with the psychologist, tell them that her mother has died,” Klimentii revealed. The General Directorate of Care for Children and Adolescents (DGAIA) of the Generalitat has taken charge of the guardianship of the minors. “I was not married to Diana and I have no right to the girls. The father is in Russia and I think he will have to come look for them,” he reports. The impact and the lack of documents proving the relationship between Diana and Klimentii has left this young man who spent many days with his girlfriend in Badalona, but who lives in the Barcelona neighborhood of Poblenou, isolated from information.
The tragedy has left the Raval neighborhood, built at the foot of the C-31 highway, affected. Most of the residents and those affected are gathered at the Los Escudos bar, from whose terrace they have seen the hearses leaving with the remains of the three deceased. Albiol has declared mourning in the city until next Friday.
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