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Four people have died after a building under renovation partially collapsed in Madrid on Tuesday.
Emergency services recovered the bodies from under the rubble of the six-storey building on Calle de las Hileras early on Wednesday morning, local authorities said.
The victims have been identified as three men aged between 30 and 50 from Ecuador, Mali and Guinea-Conakry who were employed at the site as construction workers, as well as a 30-year-old woman, the renovation project’s architect.
Their remains were found early this morning, nearly 15 hours after the collapse of the building’s interior structure that left its facade intact. Three other construction workers were injured after “several floors” collapsed, according to firefighters.
One construction worker named Mikhail was pumping concrete into the building’s lower floors and was outside when the collapse occurred. He said he saw a large cloud of dust and immediately sprinted away. He said it “happened to be our first day” working on the site.
Others said they were lucky to escape, heading out for lunch as the “entire building collapses”. “We saw the sun disappear,” one said, reported by El Mundo.
The exact cause is yet to be determined. The mayor said that the sixth floor collapsed, causing those below it to fall through under it.
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Miguel Seguí, chief of the Madrid City Council Fire Department, told Spanish media that a slab had collapsed on the upper floor terrace.
“There is still a lot to do,” he said. “It was a combination of factors.”
A witness told ABC they saw the building collapse like “a tremendous tornado”.
They said they were about to enter a hair salon when “I started to see a whole cloud of dust fall onto the street”. Several windows shattered, they said.
An employee in a nearby bakery told RTVE that “it sounded like a bomb”.
Emergency crews arrived on Tuesday to initially treat three injured people who had escaped on their own.
It was another 14 hours before they recovered the bodies from the site, La Vanguardia reports: “The alarms went off at 1:00 p.m., and the last two bodies were recovered around 3:00 a.m.”
One of the injured workers was being treated at a hospital for a leg fracture, emergency services spokeswoman Beatriz Martín said.
In video posted on X by emergency services, the building’s facade was covered by a huge green tarp typically used by construction crews when renovating older buildings.
The facade of the building was intact, and the rubble hadn’t fallen outside on the street.
Jose-Luis Martinez-Almeida, mayor of Madrid, wrote on X on Tuesday that eleven crews were working in the area, alongside police.
Police were accompanied by psychologists to support the relatives, local media reports.
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Authorities initially accompanied residents to their homes, fearing further landslides.
A forensic investigation tent was set up, attended by some 30 workers awaiting news of their colleagues, according to El Mundo.
Early on Wednesday, Martinez-Almeida confirmed firefighters had recovered the bodies of two people considered missing since the collapse.
Late on Tuesday he confirmed the death of one of four people then trapped in the building “and the location of another of the missing individuals among the rubble”. Rescue workers recovered two bodies shortly before midnight.
Madrid’s Judicial Police will lead the investigation into the collapse, emergency services wrote on X.
Ms Martín said it was too early to talk about the cause.
One resident, named only as Cayetana, told El Mundo that “the building had been utterly neglected since I arrived” 10 years ago.
“It was to be expected. Given the condition it was in, sooner or later something bad was bound to happen, and that inevitable day has arrived,” she said.
The building, erected in 1965, had been acquired by the Saudi fund RSR Singular Assets Europe Socimi for €24.5 million in 2022 after falling into disrepair.
It was planned to be developed into a four-star hotel with 122 rooms and six floors over a surface area of almost 6,500 square meters over two years.
Did you see what happened? Contact james.reynolds@independent.co.uk
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