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.
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.”
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.
