High-rise fire in Valencia ‘probably caused by faulty electrical appliance’

‘Forensic police have established that the causes of the fire were accidental and that it was probably caused by an electrical appliance in one of the apartments,’ said María José Catalá, the mayor of Spain’s third-largest city.

Catalá said that an on-going investigation is still needed to determine why the blaze, which devastated a 14-storey high-rise and an adjoining 10-storey block which together housed 138 flats, spread so quickly. ALSO READ: Valencia falls silent to pay tribute to victims of residential high-rise inferno.

‘The first results of the national police investigation show the fire probably originated from inside the kitchen and that it was caused by a household appliance,’ the national government’s delegate in Valencia Pilar Bernabé told the media.

The fire, which spread rapidly, sending plumes of black smoke into the sky over the western Campanar district of the city, started on one of the middle floors and engulfed the entire building within 30 minutes, fuelled by strong winds of up to 60 kilometres per hour. The tragic incident left around 450 residents homeless.

Previously, some experts had suggested that the presence of highly flammable cladding on the building could have contributed to the rapid spread of the blaze, drawing comparisons to the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where 72 people lost their lives due to combustible cladding.

Three days following the Valencia blaze, a child and two adults died in another fire inside a high-rise residential block in the Spanish seaside town of Villajoyosa, some 150 kilometres further down Spain’s east coast, in the province of Alicante. ALSO READ: Three dead and 15 injured in fire at block of flats in Villajoyosa, Alicante.

ALSO READ: 10 dead after fire destroys residential high-rise in Valencia.