Around four in the afternoon this Monday, the Center of Montevideo was shocked by the arrival of firefighters, ambulances and police. A fire had started in a building on 18 de Julio and Paraguay that ended with the death of an older woman.
Four blocks away, gray smoke, at times black, could be seen coming out of the Aramaya hotel.
Pedestrians who circulated along the main avenue, in addition to merchants, went out to the sidewalk to find out what had happened. They found out that mothers and children were staying at that hotel thanks to a program of the Ministry of Social Development (Mides).
The fire had started in room 505. A woman who lived on the sixth floor heard screaming while cooking.
He immediately went downstairs with one of his sons to see what was happening. “Because they were children’s cries”, described to The Observer who preferred not to reveal his identity.
The woman walked down the hallway on the fifth floor following the sound of screaming. She was looking for a way to help someone affected. Suddenly, she came across the door of apartment 505, from which smoke was coming out.
She yelled for help to open the door to that room. A “companera from Mides” arrived there, with whom they managed to force her.
Inside, they saw nothing. “It was impossible to see through the smoke. It was black like this jacket“, described the woman pointing to the coat of another Aramaya resident.
Neither of them could get through that thick block of smoke but they could hear the screams of the children behind. Later, they learned that she was a girl of two and a boy of nine.
“Go down and say that there is a fire on the fifth floor,” he told one of his children and tried to warn the rest of the residents of that floor who were not yet aware of the situation.
When the hotel staff came up, they tried unsuccessfully to mitigate the outbreak with the fire extinguishers. “It was worse because it caused more smoke to come out,” counted.
At that time, according to what the woman told The Observer, a hotel staff member walked through the smoke and flames to rescue the little girl. Both had serious injuries, the National Director of Firefighters, Ricardo Riaño, later assured. In the bathroom of that apartment they found the lifeless body of a woman whose identity they still could not confirm.
A mother’s refuge on the balcony
In the middle of the fire a mother and her baby escaping from the smoke they took refuge on the balcony of their room on the sixth floor. A five-year-old boy did the same thing on an adjoining balcony.
Police and firefighters indicated with signs from the street how to stay safe. There were families waiting for those affected to descend.
In the rescue, one of the firefighters pulled out a little girl wrapped in a white cloth. He carried her in her arms, intubated thanks to an oxygen tank carried by another agent behind her. Another woman and a child came out of the door of the Aramaya after five in the afternoon.
They were taken to an ambulance with the applause of those who were spectators of the scene and the tears of the families. They were out of danger.
At that time, firefighters were still fighting the fire to rescue all the victims. On the roof, they managed to get five people out: two mothers with their three children. They were evacuated down the stairs once the smoke was controlled.
They also evacuated an elderly woman, decompensated, carried by four people.
Fire Chief Ricardo Riaño confirmed that the fire was out and the victims were being treated. In turn, Minister Martín Lema reported that all the people who were staying there in the orbit of the Mides were circumstantially relocated to a property in the Rural del Prado.
