A devastating fire ravaged the Campanar neighborhood of Valencia yesterday, where nearly 140 homes were reduced to ashes in less than an hour. The tragic event caused the death of four people and many injured and missing. The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but everything points to a fatal combination of three factors: high temperatures, strong winds and combustible material on the facade of the buildings.
A material that has been banned for years
The two blocks of flats affected by the fire were built in 2005 by the Catalan real estate company Fbex, which went bankrupt with a debt of 500 million euros. The company, owned by businessman Juan Parada Henares, advertised the properties as “privileged homes” with “facades clad with an innovative alucobond type aluminum material”, which was allegedly “fire resistant” or even “incombustible”.
But the reality was quite different. According to the expert who made the technical report on the building a few years ago, Esther Puchades, the facade contained polyurethane, a highly flammable element that is used as an insulator for aluminum plates. This material has been responsible for several fires around the world, such as the Grenfell Tower in London (United Kingdom), which took the lives of 72 people in 2017, or the Windsor Tower in Madrid, which burned the same year that the Campanar buildings were built, but without fatalities.
A fire that spread at full speed
The professor of the Department of Civil Engineering of Construction and Civil Engineering Projects of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Antonio Hospitaler, who went to the scene after the fire, explained to Europa Press that the spread by the facade is “much faster than an open fire” and that, if the buildings had been made of brick, “it would not have spread”.
Hospitaler pointed out that the Technical Building Code, which was modified in 2006, after the fire in Madrid, and which has had other subsequent changes, -after 2017- “provides for this kind of situation and that the materials of the facade is not combustible to avoid the spread of fires”. This expert added that the facade has a “physical property in which the flames stick to it and, in doing so, rise at full speed”. This would also have caused the windows of the houses to break and the fire to spread inside the houses. At the same time, the professor indicated that now it is the investigation that will have to determine the origin, if the fire started inside a house, passed to the facade and, from there, to the rest of the ‘building, or if it originated on the same facade.
A neighborhood in shock because of the tragedy
The buildings in Campanar were sold as some of the most luxurious in the capital of the Valencian Country, with prices reaching 300,000 euros, according to the neighborhood itself. A figure that, at the time, was very high, but which was part of the real estate boom. Now, what has been home to 400 neighbors has become a skeleton that tells the story of the worst fire ever declared in the city. A kind of giant match that has been giving off smoke for hours and hours and is now starting to go out. Of course, leaving the dark trail of flames that may still hide more fatalities.
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