JUST AFTER 7:39 A.M. ON THE MORNING OF MARCH 11,
Dr. Ervigio Corral Torres was arriving at his office in
southern Madrid when his mobile phone rang. It was the
duty officer at SAMUR, Madrid's emergency services unit,
who told him that the Atocha train station had been hit
with what looked to be terrorist bombs.
Corral Torres had been heading SAMUR for only four
months. A compact, athletic man of 44, he had helped
found the service in 1991 and worked as an emergencyambulance
doctor thereafter, directing rescue operations
for more than a dozen attacks by the Basque separatist
group ETA. But this blast was on a horrific new scale.
When Corral Torres arrived at the devastated station just
four minutes after the attacks, he sprinted down the
platforms and into broken trains to evaluate the situation.
"Many times when passing alongside an injured person, I
had the urge to help them," he says, "but I didn't do that
because I shouldn't. I had to be organizing." After making
an instant evaluation of the scene, he learned there had
been other attacks. He sent ambulances and emergency
equipment to the other sites, brought in more resources,
and ordered his people at Atocha to start evacuating the
injured.
The March 11 attacks, which took 191 lives and injured
more than 1,500, were among the worst in modern
European history. But what Madrileños remember today,
along with the pain, was the way the city came together.
And while there are hundreds of tales of extraordinary
compassion and sacrifice, someone had to take charge of
the rescue effort. That job fell to Corral Torres, who
directed 215 medics, technicians and ambulance workers
and 173 volunteers at four separate sites. "This was
different from other attacks I'd seen," he recalls.
"Everyone was running out of there horrified. When we
arrived below to the platforms there was an absolute
silence." The force of the blast left the survivors
temporarily deaf and physically stunned, only able to
gesture for help with their eyes or hands. "They did not
hear you when you asked how they were," he says.
Because the SAMUR teams reacted quickly and efficiently,
they are credited with saving some 400 lives. Corral
Torres credits their rigorous training and experience in
dealing with ETA bombings. As the medics worked on the
devastated train platforms, surrounded by huge plates of
twisted metal and scattered human remains, there was no
shouting or frenzy, just quiet professionalism. "There
practically wasn't one word louder than the other," said
Corral Torres. Their task was made all the more difficult
when two false alarms went off in the station, and he had
to evacuate his teams before bringing them in again.
Within two hours the SAMUR teams had finished their
work at the Atocha station and the other three sites where
bombs had exploded. They had set up an ad hoc morgue in
a nearby park, where anguished families assembled to
await news. Corral Torres and two colleagues took
personal charge. "Each time that we entered the waiting
room, we were hated by all the families, because we were
going to say the name of a family member, and they knew
that he had died." This lasted 16 hours; Corral Torres
estimates that he spoke to a family every 10 minutes. "It
was very difficult and I didn't want to leave it to anyone
else," he says.
Even with all of their training, the rescuers felt the blow
from that day, too. In the days that followed, more than
90 SAMUR workers were treated for psychological
trauma. Corral Torres got to spend just two hours with his
wife and two children before he had to go out again, to
man the demonstrations as an estimated 2 million
Madrileños gathered in the city center. Typical of the
solidarity that Madrid still feels, Corral Torres doesn't
think of himself as a hero. "We were a team in SAMUR
and I had the luck - well, luck no, the responsibility - to be
there. I have never thought that I am a very important
man. No, we were a team." That team saves lives day in
and day out - and like most teams, it is only as good as its
captain.
From the Oct. 11, 2004 issue of TIME Europe magazine
Posted Sunday, October 2, 2004; 12:34 BST