Badalona woke up yesterday shocked by the tragic outcome of the collapse of the five-storey building on Carrer Canigó in the Raval district, which caused three fatalities. A property built in the sixties where 20 humble families lived who have now lost everything. "I've left my life in the rubble," said a neighbor who did not want to reveal her name yesterday. At 1:45 a.m. yesterday, the Generalitat Fire Department located the first of the bodies buried under the rubble, which occupied the entire ground floor, with a thickness of three meters, and which were removed by hand by the security forces. At 6.30 am they found the second victim, and half an hour later, a third person.
With the almost complete certainty that the building will not be able to be rehabilitated, as the mayor of Badalona, Xavier Garcia Albiol, said yesterday, the neighbors have the added drama of having lost three of their tenants. According to the mayor of Badalón, the most likely cause of the collapse was the poor condition of the materials in the attic, the area from which the collapse began that ended up collapsing the entire property. An extreme that the Fire Department did not want to confirm until the official investigation is over. What is verified is that last month the building passed the tests to obtain the mandatory certificate from the Technical Inspection of Buildings (ITE).
Among the 45 firefighters, the canine unit of the Generalitat Fire Department was essential in locating the corpses under the rubble. As he retreated, three dogs trained to locate human presence in inaccessible spaces entered the farm and marked the presence of the bodies. From the City Council, after reviewing the register, the municipal technicians confirmed that the three fatalities lived on the property, in three different flats and were correctly registered. "It's terrifying news for the city what the families have to live with now" lamented, visibly affected, Garcia Albiol.
"He's not answering me, maybe he's unconscious", cried the wife of one of the victims yesterday as she hugged her baby. She was talking about her husband, a 30-year-old man who had just become a father for the second time, after two years, of a month-and-a-half-old baby. Rescuers confirmed his identity after he died when the floor of the apartment collapsed. The circumstance is that the woman and the two children were saved because they had gone for a walk to a nearby park, and when they returned they were struck by tragedy.
Another family drama will be fixed forever in the memory of these neighbors. This is the second fatality, a 40-year-old woman of Polish origin, who had moved to Spain a few years ago, where she had immediately found work to rebuild her life. He lived in the affected block with his two daughters, aged around 12; the girls were surprised that their mother did not come to pick them up from school, as usual. "She was a very hard-working woman, she only lived for her daughters and had come to Spain fleeing a family drama", explained a neighbor. From now on, the two minors will enter the guardianship circuit of the general directorate of Child Care and Adolescence (DGAIA). The third victim is a 40-year-old woman whose information has not been released.
On the other hand, residents living in blocks adjacent to the victim, numbers 7 and 11, have been guaranteed that they can return to their homes, after they were evicted as a precaution. There are 40 families who were shaking yesterday when they remembered the victims. "They were good people, we knew them from seeing each other on the street, it's a modest neighborhood where we all know each other by sight", pointed out José Luis, another neighbor of the street. "It will be difficult for me to return to my home, I don't feel safe there", acknowledged yesterday a young South American who lives in one of the blocks that have not been affected and who, as a result of the impact, had to receive psychological assistance at the old people's home in Raval, where more than a hundred people gathered on Tuesday.
