The head of the Red Cross in Huelva warns of the psychological impact: “It’s going to be a shock”
There is hardly any movement at the Civil Protection headquarters in Huelva. The calm atmosphere has nothing to do with the unrest that took over the train station on Sunday afternoon when about thirty people approached to ask about the relatives who were on the Alvia train from Atocha to the capital of Huelva and whom, after derailing near Adamuz, in Córdoba, they could not locate. “Yesterday what we did was set up a psychosocial intervention team and a health team, because we were dealing with anxiety crises and this morning we also went here with a health team and the psychosocial intervention team,” explains Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, spokesperson for the Red Cross in Huelva and who coordinates the team of 25 people in charge of providing psychological care and accompaniment to the families of the victims and those injured in the train accident.
Throughout this morning, two girls have approached the new service post and still cannot locate a family member. “They are going from one place to another because they keep calling all the phone numbers and no one answers them or gives them news of where they are,” explains Rodríguez. The worst thing, the professional maintains, “is the uncertainty that invades you by not having information and that generates a lot of anxiety and a lot of anguish.”
“People arrive this morning with a different state of mind. Last night we had to deal with many anxiety attacks,” says Rodríguez, who remembers that some of the relatives who came to the station yesterday decided to take the car and drive to Adamuz to see if they could have first-hand information. “Our advice at the beginning was to ask them not to leave because late in the morning, they were tense and they had a few hours to travel. Curiously, we received a call that their daughter had appeared alive just when some relatives were going to leave,” he says.
Rodríguez warns, however, that difficult moments are yet to come, as what many fear is confirmed, that most of the 50 passengers who were in the first two carriages of the Alvia will have lost their lives and that many will be residents of Huelva. “It’s going to be a tremendous tragedy in a city where we all know each other,” he emphasizes. He himself says that his best friend’s sister, a classmate he had in the Red Cross whose son was in the cafeteria car when they stopped listening to his cell phone, or a neighbor who came with her daughter were traveling on that train. “It’s going to be a shock,” he predicts.
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