• Events: The balcony of hope of confinement, shattered in the explosion of the parish building on Toledo Street

  • Events. The "miracle" of La Salle La Paloma school: "The children have been saved because the snow has not let them go out to the playground"

The parish building on Toledo Street in Madrid that exploded due to a gas leak this Wednesday had undergone the revision of its seven boilers and the installation just a year ago and had been without heating for three days, according to initial investigations.

The idea that the leak was triggered by a failure in the gas supply system derived from the low temperatures of recent days is gaining ground.

In fact, the boilers had stopped working and presented

The first hypotheses indicate that David, the 35-year-old parishioner who died along with the priest Rubén, also killed in the detonation, could be checking a radiator on the ground floor, but they rule out that his action was the origin of the explosion.

"In fact, he was not carrying any tools and only went to look," the same sources indicated.

The Virgen de la Paloma parish

He denied yesterday that David was manipulating any boiler as indicated at first.

It should be remembered that last Wednesday the Archdiocese of Madrid pointed out that David admitted that he died “when he was going to help out due to a heating problem.” David's friends, a Metro maintenance operator, defend that he came to the call of his friend the parish priest, since the heating was not working, and that, "if he arrived and smelled gas, surely the first thing he tried was to turn off the tap." Four people died as a result of the shock wave: Father Rubén, 36 David, a 35-year-old Metro worker, Javier, a 45-year-old bricklayer from Puebla de Almoradiel (Toledo), and Stefko, a Bulgarian citizen who turned 47 yesterday and who was leaving the Caritas office of the parish building. of the Scientific Police are in charge of investigating the tragedy.

At the moment, they have not been able to enter the building for the visual inspection due to structural problems and are using aerial means.

Thanks to the drones they have been able to examine and record the interior of the most affected plants.

The images will be very useful to explain what happened. While waiting to enter the building, the agents try to reconstruct the hours before the detonation.

That is why they have already questioned 10 people who were in the block before the accident.

It has been possible to find out that the building began to have problems with the heating since Monday and that the seven boilers were giving anomalies since that day.

It has also been discovered that on Wednesday around 2:00 p.m. a strong smell of gauze began to be detected on several floors and that the Vicar Gabriel Benedicto himself opened the windows on the sixth floor to ventilate the building.

However, the gas released from the circuit had already accumulated on the upper floors. One of the priests confirmed that the deceased electrician was looking at a radiator on the ground floor.

He also noted that due to the cold, a meeting scheduled for Wednesday was postponed.

He added that the repair company was called to fix the breakdown and that due to the accumulation of warnings caused by the storm, they had not been able to go to the building. Just at 2:55 p.m., the first explosion occurred in the block followed by another detonation. that unleashed the shock wave that blew up the building, flying rubble and debris up to more than half a kilometer. The National Police has also asked members of the parish for the book of the inspections of the heating systems and other documents of the installation.

The boilers had been revised by the installation company in January 2020, so it was in order to consider revisions, since they have to be done every two years.There were seven boilers in the damaged block.

Two were on the ground floor, one on the third floor (which served floors three and four), two boilers on floor five for two houses on that floor, one boiler for another house on the sixth floor and one boiler on the bottom of the church.

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