Voces del Prado

Water and Fire. An emergency at the Casón del Buen Retiro

Antonio Macías Pizarro, Head of Night Surveillance, 1974-2009

Something happened here at the Casón with Salinero (ask him about it) one night when he and I were alone. The locker rooms were upstairs then. They were equipped with showers and everything. That night, right by those stairs, in the nearest halls, it must have been 2 or 3 a.m., Salinero was doing the rounds upstairs, as I had asked him to, and he noticed water coming down the plastered parts. He switched on the lights and good gracious! Oh my God! Where is this coming from? It wasn't raining. We figured it was due to a broken pipe. We starting taking pictures off the wall because we were afraid they could get wet.
The paintings were fastened at the sides and top. Not the type you could easily remove--they were screwed on. Salinero said, "I'm going upstairs." When Salinero came down I had no choice, sadly, but to brace my foot against the wall and pull the paintings off one by one. They were small paintings and luckily they came out fairly easily without damaging the frames or the wall. When I saw that, it seemed to save the day and I kept bringing down the pictures. Fortunately there were no large, period paintings. After a while the water leakage ended. A thermos deposit had busted. Salinero was so nervous that when mopping up the water, being so strong, he would break the mop sticks. I told him, "Quit breaking the sticks, otherwise we'll have to use sheets to mop up the water!"
Another night at the Casón, at one of the side doors entering at Felipe IV, at the back on the right-hand side, there was a light transformer out on the street. That evening they had sanded the wooden floors and had put the sawdust in a bag. About an hour later I saw smoke. I immediately thought, "The transformer has burned." Actually, somebody had thrown a cigarette butt in the bag of sawdust. Not long thereafter, maybe three years or so, one night the transformer did burn. That night I was on duty with a young guy called Agustín. That time around it was tough because it was risky to go to the transformer with the thick black smoke. It was a terrible situation. But we managed to do a good job with the fire extinguishers and we put out the fire. We opened the doors a bit for ventilation and it was all in order. But we had a hard time.
There are times when it's better not to call the firemen in certain places.
And forgive me because I respect them, I think they're the best, but the first thing they do is destroy anything that gets in their way. Seeing that the fire was in a corner that represented no danger, we protected ourselves as best as we could and started aiming with the foam. Nothing went wrong.