Santiago is in mourning for the death of a 25-year-old firefighter who lost his life during the extinction of the fire declared in a city bus. The call to the siege of the Galician capital took place around 8 a.m. on Tuesday and mobilized part of the nine soldiers who were part of the night shift, which they moved in a few minutes to the place of A Cacharela, in Aríns, to control the flames. A priori an outing without complexity which nevertheless cost the life of the youngest of them. “He had passed the opposition, he had spent the internship period with us and It was his first day of work as a civil servant with a positionhis first 24-hour shift,” one staff member confirmed to ABC, devastated by the news.
Although the causes of death are still under investigation, the most plausible hypothesis suggests that the firefighter was knocked down by the burning bus without those present being able to do anything. It is believed, as to why the vehicle moved, that the heat would have deteriorated the brakes and that the small slope on which the bus stopped did the rest, in a “surprising” way and without having time to react. From the advice of Santiago, they confirm that the deceased did not participate in the work of extinction, but rather remained a simple “observer” of the maneuvers of his colleagues when he was knocked down by the bus. Witnesses to the crash also said the vehicle, which was still on fire at the time, rushed towards the fire truck that was parked nearby and hit it, leaving the deceased stuck between the two cars.
The victim’s own companions begin resuscitation maneuvers while other troops attempt to bring the fire under control. Also the health personnel who came to the scene – made up of two ambulances from the CHUS – He stayed for about an hour trying to revive the young man, although “his recovery was impossible”. The mayor of the city, Xosé Sánchez Bugallo, confirmed shortly after that it was a young firefighter who “had just joined” the Compostela plant, along with “nine other colleagues”, said entrusted one of them to this newspaper.
“The danger is always there”
Disbelief and desolation were evident on Tuesday among the checkpoint personnel who had shared the first shift with the deceased. Also among the rest of the capital’s staff, about 50 soldiers, who gradually gathered at the factory, shocked by what happened. “This news is not frequent, but the danger exists, it always is. It was a relatively simple outing, with a vehicle burning in the open air in which the main thing is not to save the car, which was already burned, but to prevent the flames from spreading to the mountain because we speaks of a rural area. The risk is still there, but the exits that concern us the most are always those related to industrial fires or the one that takes place in a garage, for example, because it is an enclosed space,” one of the Santiago firefighters told ABC.
Sources from the town hall of Compostela also confirmed that the fire from the bus had generated a small forest fire which took an hour to extinguish and that the driver of the vehicle was not injured despite the fact that when the checkpoint arrived on the scene, he was trying to control the flames with his own means.
Image of the burning bus
The mayor canceled his schedule and drove to the scene, where a group of firefighters waited for the judge to arrive to remove the body. From there he called what happened a “terrible accident” and a “great misfortune” and joined his family and friends in this moment of “true desolation”. For his part, the president of the Xunta, Alfonso Rueda, expressed through a message on the social network Twitter his love for the family of the young man and his colleagues, as well as “the recognition of all of Galicia to some professionals who risk their lives every day for the safety of all”. 112 Galicia also took advantage of this media to express her pain and convey her condolences to the young man’s family. The City Council of Santiago has decreed three days of mourning and this Wednesday an act of homage will take place in the Obradoiro, during which three minutes of silence will be observed in memory of the deceased, born in Vigo.
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