Translated Content:
It was Sunday, June 15, when their house collapsed on them. A house on Fifth Avenue, Sabunchi Street. “We were living a normal life when suddenly there was an explosion. There was smoke, darkness, fire, and dust. There was also gas, so you couldn’t breathe. We were all trapped and trapped. May God help all the people.” Sahar’s mother was saved by a passing motorcyclist, and she would like to see her again: “She stayed with me until the last moment. The fire was in front of us, but she didn’t leave me and stayed by my side. I will never forget her.” Sahar and her mother are currently living at a friend’s house in Lavasan, but their house was completely destroyed and they can’t return there. Sahar’s car was also destroyed, and they have no means of transportation. It is still unclear which institution will pay for the damage to the house and car and how. The Housing Foundation and the Crisis Management Headquarters came to their house, filled out forms, and said they would contact them. Sahar's mother had been saying since the day the war started that she was comfortable in her own home. That's why Sahar had gone to her mother's house, which was on the ground floor and had a yard, with her two cats. They thought these were advantages to being safer. They thought nothing would happen to their house, and when her aunt and cousin called them that day to go to Hashtgerd with them, they said they would stay home. Half an hour later, at around 3:30 in the afternoon, the house collapsed. Her mother was sitting on a sofa in a corner, under three main pillars of the house, with her back to the wall. They had just had lunch, and she had only unplugged her cell phone five minutes earlier. She was texting her friends and her mother was watching TV. Her cats were sleeping on either side of her when suddenly there was an explosion in the distance. The cats jumped in fear and ran under the table. Behind Sahar, there are two tall mirrors on the wall, and behind the mirrors, two large old windows. She bends down to comfort her cats, and the same cats save her. Her head was on the table, completely crushed inside herself, when suddenly there was an explosion. Her ears started to whistle from the loudness of the sound, and she was only glad that she had her mobile phone in her hand: “I couldn’t see anything. There was dust all around me, and I couldn’t see my mother, who was sitting two or three meters away from me.” The gas pipe had burst due to the explosion, and they could smell the gas: “Mom, don’t breathe deeply. Just breathe as much as you need to.” She turns on her mobile phone’s flashlight, but she can only see 10 centimeters in front of her. She sees her foot, which is bare, and the carpet slipper that she was wearing has come out of it. She walks on broken glass and tries to reach her mother. Her mother's body was shaking, and she checks her body with the light of a flashlight and realizes that she is not injured. She hears the sound of things being thrown from the house and the walls, and the smell of gas fills her nose. Sahar asks her mother to get up from the sofa, go behind a pillar, and put her hands on her head. Then she starts calling her friends and acquaintances, but her cell phone has no antenna. Finally, she manages to call one of her friends, but they don't hear her either. She hears only one word from her words: "Help, help." Face to face with fear. Sahar finally decides to do something herself. She holds the flashlight to her mother's body and realizes that her legs are bloody. She is scared. Her mother is a 78-year-old diabetic, overweight, and has recently had knee surgery. She lifts her mother’s shirt but sees no wounds: “My mother was pointing at me and screaming.” She turns the flashlight on herself and sees that her shirt is covered in blood: “I didn’t feel any pain at all. I looked and saw blood gushing out of my thigh.” The smell of gas is getting stronger and she is reaching the point of despair at the thought that they might burn in the fire: “My phobia is death by fire, and I wish something had hit me in the head, I would have passed out and not realized I was burning.” She hands her mother a handkerchief and asks her to breathe only when she needs to. She also picks up one of the sheets on the sofa, shakes it, and throws it over her mother's head: "My mother was so scared she couldn't walk. If she could, she would have followed me." Sahar picks up a cloth bag, wraps it around her bare feet, and walks toward the front door of the house: "I was walking 10 centimeters by 10 centimeters. I couldn't see what I was stepping on." Later, when they saw the house, her friend asked her how she had walked over all that broken glass. Sahar walks toward the front door, but there is no door. Two door panels had been torn off and thrown out: "I was able to see a little bit of daylight there." Their yard was covered in Iranian tar, and Sahar's car was in the corner of the parking lot: "The car had been thrown onto the exit door of the stairs by the blast wave, debris had fallen on the car, and the road was completely blocked." The smell of gas still lingers in his nose, and he keeps talking to his mother: “Mom, I’m going back. There’s no way here. The ground is full of broken glass.” He finds his shoes through the dirt and glass and puts them on. “I was bleeding so much that the shirt I was wearing couldn’t hold it in anymore, and it was pouring out onto my feet.” In the midst of the fire, dirt, and darkness, Sahar says, he remembered something from the crisis that saved him: “A few years ago, at the orphanage, because the children were getting so many injuries, we asked the emergency room to teach us first aid. At that time, they explained to us that wherever there was bleeding, we had to press firmly and bandage it with a cloth, stop the bleeding so we wouldn’t pass out, and the cleanliness and dirtiness of the cloth didn’t matter; because the infection could be controlled later. But bleeding from the thigh is different from everywhere else. "You shouldn't tie the thigh tightly, and if the blood doesn't reach the thigh, they'll have to amputate the leg." Sahar remembers this in those moments under the rubble: "I wanted to tear the sheet and tie my leg, but I remembered that I shouldn't tie it." The entire way she held her mother's arm to get her out of the house, blood trails remain with every step she takes. When they reach the reception, they see that there is a fire in front of them. Her mother's screams of "fire, fire" reach the sky: "I kept pressing my thigh and I was holding my mother too." Two men climb the wall of the house and shout, "Is anyone in this house?" and Sahar and her mother shout, "Help, help, we're here.", but they are not heard. Sahar had recently overcome cancer, breast and ovarian cancer, and she shouldn’t lift heavy weights. But she had to jump over the rubble of the sofas with her injured leg and scream louder so that they could hear her and come to help her: “They were telling me to come out, it was on fire there, and I was begging them to come help us. I couldn’t take my mother out of there alone.” The two of them jumped over the wall into the house. The small door, which they hadn’t used for years, had broken glass and the metal frame at the bottom of the door had been torn off. Finally, Sahar and her mother got out of the door and into the yard. My mother is behind the wall. It was then that the security guards came and saw that the house next door was on fire and its flames were reaching their house as well. Everyone wanted her to leave the house, but Sahar shouted, “My mother is behind the wall.” The paramedics asked her to go to the end of the alley, saying that the firefighters would come and save her mother. She refused, and at the same time, one of them picked up a very dirty sheet from the floor and held it towards Sahar, asking her to cover herself: “They wouldn’t let people come to help me, they held them back, and they kept saying that her clothes were covered in blood. Look where she was bleeding.” They told Sahar to go, promising that they would save her mother. But Sahar saw that no one was going beyond the wall and that everyone was following her. Sahar stood in the alley and started screaming, “I won’t go to any cemetery until you bring my mother beyond the wall. Is this your zeal to cover me?” They asked Sahar and her mother to walk to the end of the alley. They took them to the oil company pension office building until the rescue forces arrived. They were there when a woman suddenly saw an object embedded in Sahar’s chest: “What is this? Is the glass in your heart? I had never seen it before.” Sahar’s left chest was cut open and blood was all over her clothes. The woman who saw this scene was so shocked that she had a nosebleed and left. Finally, the emergency services arrived and pulled the glass out of Sahar’s leg: “The hands of the boy who was on duty in the emergency department were shaking. He put a bandage on my leg and asked me to press it and said if I had someone to tell, come and go with him to the hospital.” Sahar's ex-husband, who had called her after the explosion, reached them and took her and her mother to Mehrad Hospital: "When we were leaving, some people were chanting slogans and security guards were firing shots in the air." They arrived at Mehrad Hospital's emergency room, and Sahar was transferred to the emergency outpatient surgery room. Her mother was also taken to another room. Sahar needed stitches, a glass removal, and surgery: "I was getting stitches when the critically ill people arrived at the hospital from under the rubble. The emergency room was shocked to see us. They had only heard the explosion." The glass was removed from Sahar's body, and she had eight stitches on her leg and four stitches on her left chest. Her left leg also had a 10-centimeter scratch that was closed with gauze and a bandage, and it bled for several days. They did a CT scan and X-ray of her head and entire body to make sure the glass wasn't hidden somewhere or had damaged her lungs. Her mother's blood sugar was also 200, but she was in a lot of shock from the incident. One of the nurses who was doing the anesthesia for Sahar was shaking and crying, and Sahar asked her what happened: "My wife and 9-month-old baby are on Sabalan Street. Did they hit them there?" Sahar asked her to call her husband, but the nurse told her that her husband was not answering, and she called him back at that moment and said that her husband was “screaming”: “He said I had to be on shift tonight and stay in the hospital. My husband is not well.” Sahar says that a large piece of glass was removed from her leg, which damaged her nerve, but it did not rupture and will require a long time to repair. The blast wave also damaged the houses behind them. No one except Sahar and her mother lived in the four-story building. The other residents had left their homes in the days and hours before the accident. Sahar and her mother’s house suffered the most damage, because it was on the ground floor and parallel to where the explosion occurred. On the upper floors, the windows were broken and window frames were thrown into the house. Sahar says: “If they had been houses, the shards of glass could have entered their bodies.” Sahar, her mother, and her aunt are currently living in a friend's house in Lavasan. Undeterred by their life, the Crisis Headquarters and the Ministry of Housing had put a piece of paper on the collapsed wall of the house and wrote: "Dear owner, we came but you were not there, call this number." All the neighbors made an appointment and went there. They told the Crisis Headquarters that they were there now and wanted to come visit. That day, she saw one of her lost cats under the destroyed cabinets, but it was so scared that it wouldn't come out: "It finally escaped from us." For the first 48 hours, security guards wouldn't let them into the house, but they finally let them in. Sahar and her friends left food and water for her two cats to find, and about a week later, neighbors saw one of her cats and called her. He goes to the house to find his cat and collect their documents and papers, but is again denied entry. That day, he discovers that one of the water pipes in the house has burst and flooded the house. Water has been entering the house for 24 hours, and now the roof of all floors has collapsed. Finally, a street sweeper who was cleaning the alley closes the water valve: “The electrical wires there were also connected and were hanging, and the water was flowing in its own way. I don’t know how that municipal service worker had the courage to go there and close the water valve? No one helped him. We called the fire department and said that a pipe had burst on the fourth floor and that there was 15 centimeters of water on the third floor. But the fire department said that they wouldn’t come to the scene to drain water below 30 centimeters; Because if 15 centimeters of water enters the structure, nothing will happen, but now the roofs of all the houses have collapsed.” Since the day the house was destroyed, no one has come to Sahar, her mother, and the other residents of that house to ask where they are staying now: “I was young during the previous war, but I remember that they housed war refugees in schools, mosques, and hotels, but this time they didn’t sound the siren or build a shelter. They hadn’t paid my unemployment benefits for three months, and they hadn’t paid my mother’s pension either.” Sahar was told that her car had been scrapped and that she needed a traffic police report for body insurance. She called 110 police several times, and eventually a representative from the Housing Foundation and the 110 police arrived together. She answered both of their questions, and this was very difficult. The Housing Foundation tried to drag her to the office, and she asked the Housing Foundation representative to stay there and show her all the documents. The police tell Sahar that this is the tenth car he has visited since that morning to file a report of its being buried under rubble: “The police told me that one of the car owners called the body insurance company and told him that a car that was destroyed by war has nothing to do with them and that the government should pay for it.” The police tell her not to waste her time and not to seek insurance. The Crisis Headquarters has also recorded all the damage to their house and car, and when Sahar asks what they should do, he says, “I am responsible for recording the damage. You should go and follow up.” Sahar says they were not given any receipts and were not allowed to take photos of the forms: “The Housing Foundation representative told us that they would call us, but they did not give us a number where we could call them.” Join the Telegram channel of Ham Mihan