"It's the first time someone has died in my hands." This is how Kevin Muñoz, in charge of the company awarded the lifeguard service on the beaches of Teguise, Evone Servicios, recounts how he experienced the tragedy that claimed the lives of seven immigrants on Bastián Beach this Monday. Kevin and two colleagues were the first to help the occupants of the inflatable boat that arrived on the coast of Lanzarote. "I'm fine now, but I might cry like a little boy when I get home," he says.
"I was in the office we have on Las Cucharas Beach when the colleague from El Jablillo called me, who had just spotted a boat arriving at the shore. I grabbed a colleague and it took us two minutes to get to the area. When I arrived, my colleague was already in the water, he had taken out two and was taking out the third. Of the first two he took out, one walked away with a bit of hypothermia towards the town and the other stayed with us, who was later transferred to the Hospital. The third was in cardiac arrest, had swallowed a lot of water and, although we were resuscitating him with CPR and with the Local Police defibrillator, when the medical ambulance arrived, they determined that he had died," says Kevin.
According to this lifeguard, "the zodiac arrived about 20 meters from the shore" and that's when the immigrants jumped into the water. "Those who didn't know how to swim more or less reached the shore and walked away to the town to hide,"
A colleague found the corpses in the boat: "They were piled up"
Another of his colleagues was, together with a Civil Guard officer, who found the five deceased inside the boat, "which was adrift". "I told a civil guard that we had the jet ski, he put on a wetsuit and went out with one of our rescuers," says Kevin Muñoz, who says that his colleague was indeed affected, as the image he found was "quite shocking", since "the corpses were piled up". "I don't know if as they were dying along the way they were piling them up," adds this lifeguard, who states that in the boat they also found "another immigrant with hypothermia" who was transferred to the hospital, "although he was quite well."
A windsurfing school also helped in the rescue efforts with a zodiac, according to Kevin. "They brought two others to the shore, one in cardiac arrest, who was the second to die on land, whom we were also resuscitating for about an hour with the doctors injecting adrenaline," explains Kevin Muñoz.
"I would have liked the ambulances and resources to arrive sooner"
The lifeguards themselves used their clothes to cover the immigrants, who were "totally wet" even though they were wearing "two or three layers of clothing". "I covered one with my jacket and the pillow was the jacket of another colleague," says the manager of the lifeguard company on the beaches of Teguise, who points out that citizens who were in the area also lent their help. "A lady left us her socks for one of them and people brought us bottles of water to give them," says Kevin, who believes that "everything that could be done was done."
However, this lifeguard would have liked "the ambulances and resources to arrive sooner", although he doesn't really know "what the reaction time was". "To me, the time felt eternal, but everything that could be resuscitated was resuscitated between the three of us and with local police with CPR and defibrillators until the medical team arrived. We couldn't do anything else," he concludes.
