"I will never forget that child's face in front of mine, with his eyes open. Nor will I forget the helplessness of missing those five minutes to get him out with more life than I took him out with." This is the heartbreaking testimony of Daniel Corujo, a member of the Pastinaca diving club, who managed to get the little boy who died this weekend in Puerto Naos out of the water, when the car he was traveling in with his mother plunged into the sea.
For Daniel, the race against the clock began when a police officer appeared at the club's headquarters on Friday night, asking for a flashlight because there had been an emergency. But when the agent realized that he was at a diving club, he asked for his help, explaining that there was a child trapped in a vehicle that had fallen into the water. "It took us no more than six minutes to grab the equipment, get to the place and get into the water," Daniel explained on the program La Destiladera, on Radio Lanzarote, where he wanted to express his outrage at what he found when he arrived in Puerto Naos.
"There were divers from the fire department, from the Red Cross, supposedly from Emerlan, which is the one that has the acquired competence for aquatic rescue issues, and there was not a single diving team. It is useless to send 20 ambulances if you do not send a diver," Daniel denounces, stating that "it is as if I call the fire department because my house is burning down and they bring the truck without water."
Despite the fact that the security forces had been at the scene for several minutes, there was only one agent from the Arrecife Local Police in the water, who had jumped into the sea with what he was wearing. "This gentleman is the one who should be thanked for what he was trying to do, because he was in the dark, without glasses, without being able to see, touching a vehicle upside down... It is very easy to get entangled in that vehicle and stay there, and it would no longer be one life, it would be two," Daniel points out.
"When I arrived, the policeman's face was distraught from the helplessness he had, and even so he offered to go down with me to help me open the trunk of the car to get the child out." In total, in one minute and twenty seconds, according to Daniel's watch, he had completed the six-meter dive and returned to the surface with the child in his arms, still with a breath of life.
Therefore, when asked if he believes that the emergency services could have saved his life if they had brought the diving equipment, he does not hesitate in his answer. "Man, of course. If when I took him out he had been in the water for fifteen minutes and had remains of life and they tried to revive him, those people who were there, who had been there for five minutes, with just one team that they had brought, that child would be alive." And from that sentence, to anger. "How can you be from a rescue unit and arrive at an aquatic emergency without diving equipment. Well, don't come. They are charging, they are being paid subsidies, resources...? If they have people on duty, they must have the minimum resources to attend to something like that," Daniel states.
An anger that was shared by many of the residents who came to the scene on the night of the tragedy and who witnessed an agonizing wait. "When I jumped into the water, they said everything to me except nice things," Daniel recalls. "People would think he was from Emerlan, from the Red Cross...?", but not a simple fan who had to intervene in the face of the passivity of the emergency services.
"It turns out that the firefighters had the aquatic rescue unit and it was taken away from them to give it to Emerlan. And what is Emerlan? Rescue of what, rescue of corpses? They don't take a life out of the water," Daniel says as his indignation increases. "And then they come to say that they did it well, that they sent a medicalized ambulance, that they sent...? as if you send me a helicopter, my son. If you don't send me a diver to get the victim out of the water, it's the same."
