The shock after the horror collapse of a beach bar in Palma de Mallorca is deep among locals and tourists. Sad result: four fatalities and 14 injured. An eyewitness tells FOCUS online how he experienced the tragedy. And nine people from Duisburg could almost have been among the victims themselves.
The scene that presents itself to Mallorcans and numerous tourists 24 hours after the horror accident on Friday evening in Palma de Mallorca makes everyone who approaches the metal fence in front of the closed “Medusa Beach Bar” shudder.
Eyes wander from the half-full drinks bottles still on a table on the first floor down to the wooden legs. They, in turn, are only a few centimeters away from the point where the concrete ceiling of the terrace broke off over a length of six or seven meters on Thursday evening at 8.30 p.m. and apparently crashed down onto the terrace on the ground floor with at least a dozen people.
Nothing can be seen from the terrace where various people are said to have eaten at tables other than a black, angular hole. The floor of the ground floor terrace was torn into the depths of the basement just a few moments after the concrete ceiling fell. The result: four dead, including two German tourists aged 20 and 30, 14 people were injured, nine of them seriously.
One person who saw the disaster with his own eyes is Raul. He runs a drinks and candy store two doors to the left of the beach bar. “At half past eight I suddenly heard a huge bang and immediately ran outside. When I looked at the beach bar, I saw some parts of the terrace on the first floor crashing onto the terrace below, burying various guests. A few moments later, the ground floor terrace collapsed with another bang,” says Raul, who is a popular conversation partner that evening.
The shock is still evident on Raul’s face as he recovers from all the conversations at the checkout in his store. “It was a terrible sight, it all happened very quickly.” He and others present immediately called the fire department, which was there four or five minutes later and immediately brought the first injured people to safety on the street.
One of the many passers-by who stop by this well-known bar on this Friday evening is called Sedin and comes from Duisburg. Sedin and his eight Duisburg friends, all in their 30s, look wordlessly at the huge chunks of concrete in front of the house, shattered wood and a splintered neon sign. Then someone says, “Man, we almost sat there!”
Asked by the reporter whether they had already been to the “Medusa Beach Bar,” Sedin replied: “We were all passing here last night around 7:30 p.m. when a waiter called out to us from upstairs: ‘Hey guys, come up and eat with us !’ But we then decided differently and ate in a restaurant a little further up Playa de Palma.”
However, they only found out about the accident from his wife much later in the evening. “She sent me a WhatsApp from Germany and asked if I was okay. I replied, ‘What do you mean?’ And then we were blown away when she sent us a video and we saw where it was.”
Many older Mallorquins talk about the quality of these old, mostly only two-story houses that stand between six or seven-story hotels directly on the sea promenade. “These are old houses that were supposed to have been built around 70 years ago,” says a lady with brown-colored hair and a dark blue blouse. “The quality is probably not the best. And the rest is done here by the sea with its salt, which simply eats everything.”
The Mallorcan authorities are now checking whether the restaurant can provide evidence of all official approvals for structural changes and the necessary operating licenses, Oscar Fidalgo, regional minister for urban planning, announced to the newspaper “Diario de Mallorca” on Friday.
When a middle-aged man happens to walk past the older woman as she talks about the buildings and the salt of the sea, the wiry, tanned man stops. At first glance, he doesn’t look much different from many other men who wear a T-shirt and shorts. But instead of sandals, he wears dusty work shoes with reinforced toes and a pencil behind his ear.
And then he takes a swing. “I work for myself in the construction industry and have been in many houses like this. And I can tell you two things about that. First: These houses have all the permits, because the owners have to show them before anything structurally changes. The second thing is that everything is simply approved here, regardless of whether it is good or bad.”
Then he turns around, points pointedly to the beach bar behind the bridle with the banner “Policia Local” and then turns back to the lady: “And what we see here fits exactly with the result of this method “The consequences of which no one cares about in the end,” the man complains angrily and moves on.