At the doors of the Jardines de Villafranca psychogeriatric hospital, in this municipality on the Left Bank of the Ebro, one of the most moved voices and one that expresses itself most before the media on this Friday of tragedy is Volga Ramírez. Cuban by origin, this resident of the nearby Nuez de Ebro municipality has led the Villafranca de Ebro Consistory for Tu Aragón for two terms (split from the Aragonese Party) and had never imagined having to face a tragedy of these dimensions.
«At five in the morning I was notified by 112. I came with my husband to the residence and as I entered the road I thought that a nearby field had burned. Upon arrival, I did not enter due to lung problems, but we saw the two workers come to remove residents, risking their lives, without masks. They’ve thrown a couple of… as we say here. Then there were already agents from the Civil Guard and my husband and some other neighbors went in to remove people from inside,” she says. That quick action, witnesses say, saved “many lives.” “They are heroines, but now they are broken,” adds the mayor. All those who came to this residence in the early morning were shocked by the scene of a completely burned woman. Firefighters had difficulties finding the bodies of the other nine deceased.
The smoke was intense in the left wing of the center where the fire originated, they say, but as confirmed by Ana Cristina Botella, spokesperson for the Zaragoza Civil Guard, and Eduardo J. Sánchez, chief of the Zaragoza Fire Department, “in one hour there was hardly any fire left. In fact, a few hours after the tragedy, “in the residence, which is well sectored and where the fire was contained by a security door that acted as a fire barrier,” says Sánchez, you enter now and “it seems that it did not happen.” nothing,” they say from the Red Cross. However, the images released by the Criminalistics Group of the Civil Guard, which arrived from Logroño to review the state of the property and pinpoint the cause of the fire with certainty, do allow us to see hallways blackened by the effect of the dense smoke.
Residents say they saw no flames. They had been contained to the room where the fire started. But the smoke sneaked into the rest of the facilities and up to 32 people (a Benemérita agent and 31 users of the center arranged by Arade, the Aragonese Association of Dependency) had to be treated by the 061 health services in those first minutes. All of the injuries were minor, except for two residents aged 65 and 72 who were transferred to the Royo Villanova Hospital in Zaragoza, where the second is on the ward and the first remains in critical condition and is admitted to the ICU.
“My mother is unharmed”
José Ángel Barat rushes to the residence at the mayor’s call. Fortunately, his mother, Pilar, 98, is one of the residents who has emerged unscathed, so he confesses that he “arrives calmly” at the center. “It is not the same as those who have verified that their relatives were among the deceased,” he laments, while extending his condolences to the ten families. Paloma and Alfonso do it too. Her father, 81, is “deaf,” she says, and “didn’t even realize when the auxiliaries were shouting ‘fire'” to save you. «My father, José, is as if nothing had happened. It is true that other users were a little nervous,” he adds. The 57 survivors are transferred mid-morning to the Vitalia residence in Huesca in two minibuses enabled from the burned residence.
The bravery of the two workers is the ‘talk’ of the town where the residents, barely 800, do not remember being the protagonists of any event of this magnitude. “I went to bed when I heard it on the radio,” says María, an octogenarian. He approaches a handful of people at 1:00 p.m. to observe a minute of silence in the Town Hall square next to the municipal corporation, where the councilor and also the winner of Big Brother Iván Madrazo is located.
Opposite, in the church of San Miguel Arcángel, the parish priest Ignacio Laguna has placed a candle in the tabernacle in tribute to the deceased. Some relatives have gone in to pray when they received the blow in the Town Hall. Five or six residents fraternized with him, had a drink at the bar, walked or went to mass. They lived with the people “in a family way,” says the priest.
#workers #saved #lives #heroines #broken
