At the stroke of three in the afternoon this Sunday, a hundred relatives of the people missing in the fire at the Murcia nightclub The Fonda of Miracles He was waiting to find out if his loved ones were among the 13 deaths confirmed up to that point. They waited for news together in the Sport’s palace of Murcia, just 150 meters from the room where the fire broke out, and surrounded by the team that Red Cross had traveled to the place to attend to them.
The psychologist is part of it Luis Perez Molina, who in conversation with this newspaper, defined the state in which the group was at that time as “a certain calm.” «They are eager for information, with the suspense of not knowing if their relative is in one condition or another, waiting to receive more specific news from the authorities. There will be people whose family member has died, but the window is open that they could be in the hospital or even that they had left the premises before the fire and could still be located today,” thus describing the situation of uncertainty they were experiencing.
«It is a moment in which if you hurry me, understand, they are even calm in quotes, because they have already given the pertinent information about each of their relatives and they are waiting to be told something else, in a standby, more calmer than when they suddenly arrive at the place where they have been summoned. The relatives, the expert explained, had spent the morning in tension giving an account of the person they had missing and any physical features, clothing or tattoos that could lead to their recognition.
Pérez Molina is a volunteer psychologist of the Immediate Emergency Response Group of the Red Cross (ERIE), specifically the subgroup of Psychosocial Intervention, dedicated to providing psychological first aid and human support to victims of tragedies such as the one that occurred early Sunday morning in Murcia. He belongs to the group of three psychologists, seven accompanying first responders, five health emergency technicians, two nurses, a social worker and a member of the Autonomous Operations Center, mobilized following the request of the 112 from different parts of the region – he resides in Yecla– around 11:00 a.m. on Sunday.
«Upon arrival we found a group of six families, each of them with a missing person. At that time, psychological care and support was provided to those who needed it most, those who were in a state of greatest concern or anxiety,” he said about the intervention in the first moments. “Throughout the morning many more families have joined until we reach approximately a hundred people,” he added.