The 9 hours to evacuate Alejandro, a resident of El Prat weighing more than 250 kilos, from among tons of garbage

With the confinement, he stayed at home and did not go out anymore. He would ask for food at home or bring him a friend who came to help him since his more than 250 kilos of weight prevented him from moving, so Alejandro could not clean and the garbage accumulated on the ground floor of Estany de la Albufera de El Prat de Llobregat (Barcelona) where he lived. This is how the emergency services found him last Wednesday when he himself called 112 around 8:30 in the morning.

Alejandro had fallen, possibly due to a leg disease, and he was feeling unwell so he could not get up. “When the local police officers arrived and entered the apartment, they freaked out,” police sources told this newspaper that they found tons of garbage scattered throughout the premises and, in the middle on the bare floor, the man. He is 48 years old and could suffer from 'Diogenes syndrome'.

Some 9 hours of rescue were necessary to be able to remove him and transfer him to the Bellvitge hospital. The Generalitat Fire Brigade together with personnel from the Emergency Medical System (SEM), local police and Mossos d'Esquadra could not gain access through the door due to the large amount of garbage accumulated behind it and for this reason they used a crane to make a hole on the façade near a window and thus access the interior of the apartment, in addition to propping up the roof.

Then they removed part of the rubbish, which was scattered along the street, and proceeded to evacuate Alejandro through the same hole with a stretcher helped by a mechanical bull to lower him to the ground.. For hours, workers from the El Prat City Council cleaning brigade removed the accumulated rubbish. Numerous videos, such as those broadcast by the journalist Anna Punsí, show the rescue and the problems of the emergency services to get the man out due to the amount of waste that was in the building and his weight.

At the moment he is admitted to the hospital and according to the social services of the El Prat City Council when he leaves they will see what kind of action will be done since he can go to a health center to fully recover or return home for what he will have an “accompaniment” by the Consistory since he may suffer a mental health problem. It is not the first time that they have taken care of him, explains Arnau García, head of social and community action at El Prat.

After a first contact in 2003, it was in 2012, as a result of a complaint about the bad smell of the house by the neighbors, when an intervention began in which a “shock cleaning” of Alejandro's apartment was carried out and I accompany him to the health care he required. In those years he received home visits and at the end of 2015 the file was closed considering that the man, who at that time worked at the airport in addition to making computer repairs, was better and was autonomous in his movements.

Since 2015, the emergency services have received three calls from neighbors warning that Alejandro “did not show signs of life” and when police officers went to his house and rang the doorbell, they did not answer.. Despite this, the social or health services contacted him by phone and told them that he was fine, so they did not carry out any emergency action since “he would not let us in”. It was with the confinement when he stopped going out and no one brought him the medication he was taking either.

In this sense, García remarked that in El Prat I use a pilot plan to unify the coordination between health and social services to detect cases such as that of the neighbor with Diogenes syndrome. Thus, not going to the doctor periodically without justification or not going to the drugs can be an indication that that person needs help, according to the person in charge of Social Action.

Neighbors in the area point out that the man lived with his parents but that when he died he was left alone and could have suffered from depression, which is why he did not leave the house. In addition, they regret that the City Council should have carried out a follow-up since there was a “risk” to health, both their own and the property due to the accumulation of garbage. A neighbor from the same building explained in Cuatro that she had been complaining about “horrible smells” for a long time while the man was “in a fatal situation, he could hardly walk. They had to bring him from the airport with a van, and he could hardly go up to his house, and he lived on the ground floor.

In addition, the woman added that the unsanitary problem was serious since he relieved himself in bottles and remarked that they brought him food since “they have seen how they left him like bags under the hole and that he dragged them” inside the premises, which could lack of supplies. Police sources have explained to this medium that they received calls for bad odors and that they even had a “police code” to act in these cases.

However, from the El Prat City Council it is noted that the calls received in recent years by the emergency services in reference to the man were since there was no news about him “and not due to a public health problem” as would be the effect of Diogenes syndrome that he suffered. Now Alejandro, 48, is recovering in the hospital and will be treated again since the City Council reopened his file after being evacuated on Wednesday.