Two workers died this Tuesday during the rehabilitation works of a building on Lezama Street in Madrid, when a concrete slab fell on them. The firefighters managed to remove the block and access the mortal remains around seven in the afternoon, after almost eight hours of maneuvers. The accident has also left an injured person with multiple fractures who had to be transferred to the La Paz hospital. According to the story of the rest of the colleagues, the workers were propping up the structure when it gave way and fell on them.
“From the beginning we had seen that the situation was incompatible with life, they died in a very radical situation. It was a slab that was on the fourth floor. When we arrived, we found an unstable structure that required some very arduous coordination maneuvers in which we did what we had to do to guarantee safety. There has been a lot of tension even though we knew that we were rescuing lifeless bodies,” a fire department spokesperson detailed.
The roar has caused the offices surrounding the building that collapsed, on the corner of Lezama and Llodio streets, in the north of Madrid, in an industrial estate in the Fuencarral-El Pardo district to resonate. It was eleven in the morning when one of the concrete blocks fell off and imprisoned two of the three workers who were propping them up at that time. They are Ngolo, originally from Niger, 50 years old, according to his colleagues, and Álvaro, a Colombian man in his 30s. The injured man’s name is Hassan.
The rest of the workers have been immediately evacuated from the construction site and the injured person rescued has been stabilized and transferred to the La Paz hospital with multiple fractures. According to the testimony of Hassan, one of the workers’ colleagues – different from the injured one – the two possible fatalities were shoring up the fourth floor, when one of the heavy concrete slabs gave way on their heads, they fell and the block of cement has crushed them. Another colleague has reported that just at that moment he was close to the deceased and that they were precisely talking about how to proceed with the shoring.
The Samur, the Firefighters and the Municipal Police have worked in the area, which is the one that will take charge of the investigation as it is, according to everything, a work accident. To do this, the force has put two drones into operation, one that flies over the area and another of tiny dimensions that has slipped slightly into the hole in which the employees are supposed to have been imprisoned. “Everything happened very quickly, I saw how the slab crushed them, they couldn’t survive. We were shoring up, the slab has given way. I don’t understand how it could happen,” explained Hassan, wrapped in tears.
What affects the most is what happens closest. So you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
Subscribe
The block had been a Mapfre office building that is currently undergoing a comprehensive remodeling to convert it into a student housing building, as explained by the workers. “This has been a long-standing small industrial estate that for years has been converted into an area of residences and student flats,” said Jorge Olmeda, owner of a blinds company located a few meters from the accident site. This work had been in progress for at least six months and was being carried out by Demoliciones Madrid. When asked by this newspaper, the company declines to make statements at this time because “everything is very recent.” “We barely have any information,” he added.
The mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, went to the scene after the Emergency Department announced the accident and explained that the building is “in a situation of instability” and that “it is very difficult” to access it. The rescue operation is being extremely complicated. Firefighters have needed a ladder and hanging with harnesses to work on the floor where the collapse occurred.
The mayor added that the “consolidation work will take a long time” and that we must “be calm because at this time there are some slabs and several beams that also threaten to collapse.” In order to shore up and consolidate the building, a crane from a nearby construction site has been moved to the site to “be able to begin moving certain material, which is inside the building.”
On the other hand, Almeida explained that “it was a building that had a tertiary use” that has changed to “residential use”, where “140 homes” were going to be built. “What we are looking at at the City Council now, of course, are the licenses to check that everything is in order, there is certainly no conclusion to be drawn for now, but we are already checking from the urban planning point of view the licenses and the administrative procedure followed. to be able to begin the execution of these works,” he insisted. A spokeswoman for Urban Planning has indicated that the building belongs to a private individual and that, in principle, all the documentation appears to be in order.
Subscribe here to our newsletter about Madrid, which is published every Tuesday and Friday.
#workers #die #floor #building #undergoing #rehabilitation #Madrid #falls #slab #crushed