The blue lights of the ambulances do not stop reflecting in the windows of the municipal booth in Adamuz, the Cordoban town of about 4,600 inhabitants that has devoted itself to the injured and survivors of the very serious accident that occurred after 7:30 p.m. this Sunday and in which at least 21 people have lost their lives. After midnight, inside that facility, to which all those affected have been transferred, there are hardly any travelers left. The majority, after receiving the first attention, are being transferred by ambulance to nearby hospitals and the uninjured have boarded buses that have taken them to their destinations. Although the movement of security forces and health personnel is not as intense as in the hours immediately after the derailment, the nervousness does not subside, especially among the relatives who have traveled there to try to locate their loved ones, with whom they have not yet been able to contact.
This is the case of Ramón Montón, who at the doors of the booth is desperately looking for his wife, Tamara Margarita Valdés, of Cuban nationality and resident in Huelva. “I’m very nervous, I still haven’t been able to locate it, it took me three hours from Huelva, I stepped on it a little bit,” he admits. His partner was one of the 184 passengers traveling to the capital of Huelva from Madrid on the Alvia, which was hit by an Iryo coming from Malaga and bound for Atocha, which derailed, although the causes are still unknown. “I spoke to her 20 minutes before the accident. The train almost missed her,” he says with contained anguish. Shortly after, Montón was transferred by an emergency services professional to another place, because Tamara is not in the municipal booth.
She is not the only missing passenger. “We are looking for a girl from Huelva that we have not been able to locate. A friend who was traveling with her on the train has told us that she does not know where she is and we are trying to locate her to find out how she is,” says María, one of Adamuz’s neighbors who is part of the network of volunteers from the town who have lent a hand at the municipal booth.
Santiago, another resident of Huelva, has had better luck, who, however, cannot shake his anguish. “We felt a sudden brake. The train began to move from side to side until it stopped. When I got out of the train I saw a dead person and we tried to go to car number one, but it was a mass of iron. People were asking for help and we tried to get them out, but it was very difficult,” he says about the first moments after receiving the impact of the derailed Iryo. Santiago remembers that it took a long time for the emergency services to arrive at the scene of the accident – “approximately an hour” -. The first to arrive, he says, was a couple from the Civil Guard, “but they were all overwhelmed.” Now he is heading by ambulance to the Andújar Hospital to have the blows he suffered to the chest and calf examined.
Antonia Rodríguez, another resident of Huelva who was traveling on the Alvia – the train that “took the worst part” in the accident, according to her – did not feel the fear either. His voice trembles. “We were in the fourth car of the Alvia, which has been on the tracks for almost two hours. My daughter is pregnant. We think everything is fine, we’ll see,” he explains before getting into the ambulance with his daughter.
At the municipal booth, all Alvia travelers bound for Huelva are becoming less and less affected, since the unharmed passengers of the Iryo train have already been transferred by buses to their respective destinations. “We felt a first brake and, in tenths of a second, another very strong one. The table fell in front of the seat on top of it, the lights went out and the roof of the car fell,” says Bianca Birleanu, a 23-year-old native of Huelva who was traveling in car number 4 of that Alvia.
“It was all dark, someone opened an offer and they managed to leave, take their luggage down and the Civil Guard asked us to go to the Adif building. There we understood the magnitude of what happened.” Car number 2 was all rubble, a mess. And on the other side there was also a lot of damage, everything was dusty. That impression was greater than the accident itself,” adds his partner Jorge García, also 23 years old, who prefers not to look around and has not even followed the information from the media. “Tomorrow we will realize what happened. We have been reborn,” García acknowledges.
Like Sergio, the young people agree that there was a bit of initial chaos so that the wounded could be treated first, and then they were taken by bus to Adamuz. The two students now only want to get to Huelva. “We still haven’t seen anyone from Renfe, and we have seen a lot of Iryo staff. They always leave those of us from Huelva abandoned,” they lamented.
Huelva native Toñi Torres, 48, is about to board the bus that will take her to Huelva at dawn. He says he has lived the longest seconds of his life. “When the accident happened I wanted to grab my son and I couldn’t. The light went out and I didn’t know what had happened. Until everything turned on again and I saw it and heard it, my soul didn’t return to my body,” explains the woman, who was traveling in car number 4 of the Alvia bound for the capital of Huelva. “We have been very lucky. When we saw how the rest of the carriages were… How lucky!” she insists excitedly just before entering the bus.
The doctor from 061, Jessica Romero, emphasizes how at the Adamuz municipal booth they have treated 138 patients, only two of them with the yellow rating, “a little more serious.” While the remaining travelers leave the premises to board the buses that will take them to their final destination, only dozens of white plastic chairs remain in the area, members of the health and civil protection services and the technicians who are carrying out the tasks of removing the bodies.
