- The Ice Rink in Madrid is to store corpses following the collapse of the funeral service.
The Community of Madrid and the Military Emergency Unit will manage the building when it becomes operational.
Madrid Funeral Home are to stop the bodies of those individuals who die of the coronaviruses due to lack of protection.
The Ice Palace in Madrid is being converted into a gigantic morgue following the collapse of funeral parlours in the capital. The building will store the corpses of those who died from coronaviruses due to the impossibility of burying or cremating them in the scheduled time. This was announced by the City Council today, which, this morning, had already announced that from Tuesday the municipal Funeral Home will not collect any more Covid-19 deaths due to the lack of protective material for its workers.
The site, the ice rink of a large shopping centre, will be controlled by the Community of Madrid and the Military Emergency Unit (UME) when its conversion has been completed.
The measure has been agreed between the three administrations because of “the progressive increase in the number of deceased and the impossibility for funeral homes to be able to bury them within the appropriate time.”
The building has an area of 1,800 square meters and is located just fifteen minutes from Ifema, where an emergency hospital with more than a thousand beds has been built.
The Ice Palace, relinquished by the concessionaire company, will receive the bodies after the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, has sent a letter to the Government explaining the current situation which has completely as a result of having to deal with a death rate of 150 people per day. And neither are they able to provide the service due to the lack of resources for workers.
“Especially alarming is the situation in which we find the Municipal Company of Funeral Services, given that the lack of the protective material will make it impossible, from Tuesday, March 24, to provide the service,” he said in the letter.
However, municipal sources clarify that the closure will not be complete. “What they will stop doing is collecting and sealing the bodies of the victims of coronavirus, having run out of sufficient protection material.”
However, the City Council confirms that there will continue to be cremations and burials for the victims of the virus if they are sent by other companies in closed coffins.
