The Community of Madrid will review the facades of Madrid buildings built with insulators such as polyurethane, a material that could have functioned as a flame accelerant in the tragic Valencia fire. Yesterday, precisely, the Minister of Housing, Transport and Infrastructure, Jorge Rodrigo, and the dean of the College of Architects of Madrid, Sigfrido Herráez, They held a meeting in which this was one of the topics they addressed.
At the moment, there is no exact number of homes that would have incorporated this material in their construction, although it could be part of buildings built between the years 2000 and 2019, when the regulations allowed its use, as Herráez detailed to LA RAZÓN. It would be about homes from the different PAUs in Madrid, such as Carabanchel, San Chinarro, Las Tablas…Although he also pointed out that “not all polyurethane used in construction is combustible.”
However, since 2019 this material has been prohibited as insulation in different constructions and is no longer used.
The dean of the College of Architects explained that «the first of the tasks that will be tackled will be to quantify the number of homes that could be affected by the old regulations, see what degree of danger there may be, since a building of many heights is not the same as a building of only two or three and Once the problem has been dimensioned and the buildings that may be “dangerous” have been detected, the necessary material changes will be made.».
According to Herráez, these changes They will foreseeably be borne by the Community of Madrid, “in no case by the neighbors”.
At the moment, we have already talked about the need to open an office in which to provide information to both neighbors who have doubts about the materials they have used as well as the architects.
The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, announced yesterday that his Government is going to ask the Ministry of Housing to review the Building Code since 2006 after the Valencia fire tragedy last week.
“We are going to ask the Ministry of Housing to review it since 2006 to see if it is finally determined what has caused this building to catch fire, if it is something that is the general rule in many other buildings,” he said. in an interview on Antena 3.