It will take a long time for the displacement they have had this past weekend to be erased from the minds of the Txuri Urdin ice hockey players. … of the week to Puigcerdá to play a double league matchday. Ten members of the Txuri Urdin expedition yesterday required hospital care in the hyperbaric chamber of the Moisés Broggi Hospital in Sant Joan de Espí in Barcelona after inhaling carbon monoxide during the match on Sunday due to a leak from the ice smoothing machine. “We got worse on the way back,” team coach Irene Senac warned this newspaper. “We left Puigcerdá with the idea of reaching San Sebastián and we had to stop in Manresa, in the Emergency Room, because some players felt bad.”
The players had breathing problems manifesting in severe chest pain so, after an initial examination in Manresa, they were transferred to Barcelona, to one of three hyperbaric chambers in Catalonia.
Of the ten affected members – seven players, the coach Irene Senac and the masseuse – one of them improved positively in a few hours and finally joined the rest of the expedition to resume their journey back to San Sebastián without passing through Barcelona. The nine hospitalized had to do so late in the afternoon after receiving oxygen treatment.
From the beginning, the situation was under control given the mildness of their symptoms, which did not prevent the concern of the families, who from a distance were promptly informed of the evolution of the players, some of whom were minors. After receiving treatment, last night they began their return in a minibus. His arrival was scheduled for early morning.
The effect of altitude
It so happens that the ice rink in the town of Girona is located at 1,200 meters above sea level, so it is common for visiting teams to suffer headaches and dizziness before, during and after matches. Those, precisely, were the symptoms that coach Irene Senac’s pupils noticed, increased by the fact that there was a double league matchday.
The players attributed their discomfort to fatigue from having played two games in less than 24 hours and at first they did not give importance to this discomfort, although everything changed when the match referees urged them to leave the locker room and leave the facility as soon as possible. At least 58 people were slightly injured, according to the Sistema d’Emergències Mèdique, which displaced ten units. Five people were taken to the Cerdanya Hospital, including a minor.
The Txuri is studying the measures to be adopted in the coming days. They will transfer what happened to the Spanish Ice Sports Federation, Puigcerdá and the institutional officials because they feel that “something worse” could have happened and because they have felt “defenseless” in the face of a situation that had already occurred before.
Puigcerdá, repeat offender
And Puigcerdá is a repeat offender for cases of carbon monoxide inhalation, since in 2022 twelve U-18 players from the Millennium of Logroño had to be admitted for the same reason: the leak of this gas from the machine that smoothes the ice. Then one person fainted and the ward had to be evacuated. A situation similar to the one he experienced on Sunday.
The evolution of the Txuri Urdin players has been closely monitored from the town of Girona and the club has made itself available to the “competent authorities.”
The coach of the Puigcerdá men’s team, Salva Barnola, was on the bench for the Txuri match and tells this newspaper what happened on Sunday. “I started hearing a beeping sound in the third quarter that then got louder as time went on.”
He immediately understood that it was the alarm that warns of altered carbon monoxide levels. «I immediately alerted the people in the stands. Luckily, the action of the Firefighters, Mossos and ambulances was very fast.
Barnola indicates that “all those people who had a saturation level of more than 10 required oxygen outside the sports center and those who had a saturation level greater than 20 digits were admitted.
The Puigcerdá coach recognizes that “the machine that smoothes the ice is programmed so that when there is a leak, it whistles and warns. When this did not happen, the machine was sealed and removed and an electric one was ordered, which will arrive in a few months. To date, Puigcerdá will have a diesel smoothing machine.
