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Deadly fire in Spain’s southern city of Valencia has grim echoes of London Grenfell Tower disaster
Valencia, Spain — At least four people died in a huge fire that ripped through a 14-storey apartment block in Valencia, eastern Spain, and at least 14 were reported missing, with officials warning on Friday that the death toll could rise. Experts said the building, which contained 138 apartments, was covered with highly flammable cladding, which could account for the rapid spread of the blaze after it broke out on the fourth floor early Thursday evening.
Dramatic images showed clouds of black smoke as the flames consumed the high-rise in the western Campanar neighborhood of the port city.
Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty
“Four people have died,” Jorge Suarez Torres, deputy director of emergency services for the Valencia region, told reporters overnight.
“As of now, we have 14 people who remain untraced,” regional administrator Pilar Bernabe added on Friday, stressing that the number could change.
Valencia Mayor Maria Jose Catala had said between nine and 15 people were unaccounted for, based on information provided by police and neighbors..
Fifteen people were treated for injuries of varying degrees, including a seven-year-old child and seven firefighters. Six of the 15 were still hospitalized on Friday but their lives were not in danger, regional governor Carlos Mazon said.
Officials said 22 teams of firefighters had been called in to battle the blaze. Suarez Torres said they had not yet managed to get into the building.
JOSE JORDAN/AFP/Getty
“We’re trying to cool the facade. That’s our goal over the next few hours,” he said. “We can’t say when we’ll be able to get inside.”
Spanish media said rescue workers had used drones to locate the bodies of those who perished.
A preventable tragedy?
Esther Puchades, deputy head of Valencia’s Industrial Engineers Association (COGITI), told local media the fire had spread so rapidly because the building was covered with highly combustible polyurethane cladding.
Luis Ibanez, who lives nearby, told TVE he had looked out of a window and seen the flames engulfing the building “within a matter of minutes”.
“(It was) as if it was made of cork,” he said. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The whole side of the building directly opposite was on fire, from the first floor to the sixth and seventh floor.”
The fears of polyurethane cladding exacerbating the Valencia fire recalled the 2017 tragedy at London’s Grenfell Tower. In that incident, a fire at the 24-storey high-rise in west London killed 72 people. The blaze spread rapidly due to the highly combustible cladding on the block’s outside walls.
A public inquiry into the London disaster has yet to publish its final report, but it has already revealed how some of the companies that manufactured the materials used in the cladding on Grenfell continued to market their products as safe despite some employees knowing they were flammable.
Among those companies was the American firm Arconic, which made the cladding on Grenfell Tower, through a French subsidiary.
Emails shared with the British inquiry showed that some Arconic employees knew of the danger of fire posed by the type of cladding used on Grenfell, but that the company continued to sell it anyway.
Arconic said soon after the blaze that it would stop making its Reynobond PE panels available for high-rise buildings, as it could not control how or on what building they were installed.
“Cladding systems contain various components selected and put together by architects, contractors, fabricators and building owners, and those parties are responsible for ensuring that the cladding systems are compliant under the appropriate codes and regulations,” the company said in a 2017 news release.
It was not immediately clear what company manufactured the cladding used on the Spanish apartment building.
The U.S. received written assurance from Iran before the presidential election that its leadership was not actively trying to assassinate President-elect Donald Trump, CBS News confirmed, according to a source with direct knowledge of the correspondence. The message arrived after the White House in September affirmed that killing a former U.S. president or former U.S. official would be seen by the Biden administration as an act of war.
“We consider this a national and homeland security matter of the highest priority, and we strongly condemn Iran for these brazen threats,” National Security Council spokesman Sean Savett said in a statement in September.
Iran said in its message, which was conveyed by a third party, that it understood this premise. The Wall Street Journal first reported Iran’s message to the U.S.
The Justice Department is currently prosecuting at least two individuals alleged to have been part of murder-for-hire plots to kill Trump while he was still a candidate. One operative working for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps told federal investigators that he was tasked in September with “surveilling, and, ultimately, assassinating” Trump, according to court records unsealed last week.
Prosecutors said Farhad Shakeri, who is believed to be residing in Iran, told investigators in a phone interview that unnamed IRGC officials pushed him to plan an attack against Trump to take place in October. If the plan could not come together in time, the Iranian officials directed Shakeri to delay the plot until after the election because the official “assessed that [Trump] would lose the election,” the charging documents said.
In early August, a Pakistani national with alleged ties to Iran was arrested and charged with plotting a murder-for-hire scheme targeting U.S. government officials and politicians, according to charging documents unsealed Tuesday.
A U.S. official pointed out that Iran did not task its most effective proxy force, Hezbollah, with carrying out these plots. This official described Iran’s approach to date as “nice if it works. If it doesn’t, then it’s not a problem.”
In response to inquiries suggesting that “Iran told U.S. it wouldn’t try to kill Trump”, the Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran said it would not comment on official messages between two countries.
The mission said in a statement, “The Islamic Republic of Iran has long declared its commitment to pursuing Martyr Soleimani’s assassination through legal and judicial avenues, while adhering fully to the recognized principles of international law.”
Trump has raised the ire of Iranians for a few reasons. He exited the international Iran nuclear agreement, which had lifted some sanctions in exchange for restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. He also directed the 2020 airstrike that killed top Iranian commander Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Since then, some Trump administration officials and military officials received threats from the regime, among them, Robert O’Brien, who was national security adviser during the strike. His predecessor in the job, John Bolton, who was part of the maximum pressure campaign that exerted sanctions pressure on Tehran, has also received threats.
In 2022, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Iran would threaten Americans — both directly and via proxy attacks — and was committed to developing networks inside the U.S. Two persistent threat assessments submitted to Congress by the State Department in January 2022 cited a “serious and credible threat” to the lives of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Trump administration Iran envoy Brian Hook. The non-public assessments showed that throughout 2021 and again in 2022, the State Department determined that round-the-clock, U.S.-taxpayer-funded diplomatic security details were needed to protect both men. That continues today.
Multiple former officials have spoken to CBS about duty-to-warn notices that they have recently received from the FBI and other agencies regarding the ongoing threat from Iran and Iranian-hired actors, implying the U.S. is taking the threat seriously and not taking the Iranian regime’s assurances at face value.
contributed to this report.
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