The small town of Sot de Chera (Valencia) has seen its quiet life blown up after the most terrible DANA in sixty years devastated part of the east and center of the peninsula. On Wednesday, the body of a four-year-old boy was found in the town who died after part of his house collapsed and he fell into the flood. It is not the only misfortune that the family of four has suffered: the father is still missing.
“No one expected the magnitude of what happened,” Tomás Cervera, mayor of Sot de Chera, tells ABC. “This town is separated in half by the Sot River, and we are used to floods damaging the infrastructure. But nothing like this,” he says at the end of a day full of meetings to organize the town’s cleaning tasks. The town, with 456 people registered, is a beautiful enclave that has known how to take advantage of tourism, which is why on weekends and summer its population grows to a thousand people. However, during the week about 300 souls remain, which partially reduced the impact on the town, where there are no more missing or deceased than the minor and his father.
Cervera himself was at his home in Sot de Chera on Tuesday afternoon. When he observed the flood, he tried to leave the town with his family by car, but another vehicle blocked the exit. In the end, on foot, they reached another higher building and there, after bailing for hours, they ended up sheltered on the second floor. Exhausted, the family went to sleep. “When I woke up and saw what the town had looked like, I thought we had returned to the Stone Age,” he says. The two bridges that connected both banks of the Sot had been damaged and the two parts cut off. “We had no prior warning nor could anyone imagine this,” Cervera repeats. “Not even the flood of ’57 was so catastrophic,” he says, referring to the year in which the Turia overflowed its banks, causing, according to the chronicles of the time, a flood of the river of more than 3 meters that caused 81 deaths.
Uncertainty about the dam
Adding to the desolation was the uncertainty of the status of the nearby Chera dam, in the Buseo reservoir. “It is an old dam, with structural deficiencies for a long time and, furthermore, it has been neglected for many years,” explains Cervera. The facilities were built at the beginning of the 20th century and now depend on the Generalitat Valenciana. “I reported the situation and the technicians examined it. They then decided to declare emergency situation two as a precaution.”
This statement means that the floods “exceed the attention capacity of local media and resources.” However, the 112 GVA later reported that “its levels remain stable and it seems that the water is beginning to go down.” Even so, it was decided to evacuate 50 residents of the town as a precaution, those who live closest to the risk areas. “In reality, most of them had already ‘self-evacuated’ to other areas, because many people in the town have second homes.”
On Friday, technicians from the city council traveled and, in contact with the Generalitat Emergency Center, assured that “there is no risk of collapse of the dam.” Even so, the evacuees are still distributed in other houses in the town and the local government has urged residents to leave everyone except those who remain as volunteers for the cleaning tasks. “Here we have a catastrophic situation, but like in many other parts of the province,” says the mayor, “it’s going to be a very long road until we rebuild everything.”
In fact, they already predict that basic services in their entirety will be recovered in a few months and then it will be time to “rethink the town” because it was defined as eminently touristic around the river and all the surrounding infrastructure has disappeared. In total, the fatalities due to the passage of the DANA have already exceeded 200 people, the vast majority in the Valencian Community.
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