A stand fell and several people were injured during the Parade of Calls in Durazno this Saturday 18 at night, which was organized by the mayor of that department.
Around 10:30 p.m., a bleacher located on Lavalleja and 18 de Julio streets fell despite the fact that it had few people on top of it and they were not jumping. Spectators were just watching the show when the structure “tippled and collapsed.”said Andrés Badell, one of the people who was there, to the local outlet Durazno Digital.
Badell confirmed these facts to The Observer: “At one point I see how the stands begin to fall to one side. It fell without further ado, it tilted like a pair of scissors closes”. As he stated, “moments before” the fall there were children under the stands, but they had come out before he lay down.
“There weren’t a lot of people. There were three or four adults standing around, the rest were sitting down; there were free places. I wasn’t crammed,” she commented. Badell could see, before she fell, that the harrow had “wire ties” at the intersections of the structure. “At that time I did not start to investigate if it was something simple or to reinforce the structure,” he said.
He was, together with his wife, standing behind the stands. His three children—between the ages of 9 and 14—were on the structure. “I managed to hold the stands (when it fell), I wanted to try to slow something down”, he stated. He hit his arms—his right one was pinned to the floor—and hurt his legs as well.
“Everything went very fast. In the maelstrom what I did was put my arms out, I set out to look for my children. My daughter cried in the middle of the people. people had fallen on top”, he counted. Then he began to receive medical assistance, first of all from some spectators who were there who “you could tell by how they spoke that they worked in something related to health”, until a few minutes later the ambulance arrived. She and her daughter were taken to the hospital and were only released around 1:30-2:00 in the morning the next day.
As for other injured people, Badell said that in the emergency there was also “a man who was hit on the head by the stands when he fell”, accompanied by his wife who “people fell on top of him and he lost consciousness.” There were children who suffered “head trauma and facial cuts,” he noted.
He filed a complaint before the Police, because “it is what corresponds in this situation.” “If you are in a show, what he wants is for everything to be in good condition to be able to be calm and enjoy. There was some negligence somewhere, because the stands have to be raised in such a way that they support the amount of people. Something was planned wrong, someone made a mistake, it is up to someone to take responsibility”, he assured.
