The number of fatalities left by DANA has already reached 202 people, as confirmed by Cecopi (the Emergency Coordination Center), while there are still 1,900 people reported missing to 112. One of the critical points that still What has not been addressed are the underground parking lots, both in shopping centers and supermarkets or in the residential buildings themselves in the affected areas, as elDiario.es has verified on site in the district of La Torre and in Sedaví.
Eduardo Martínez, a Primark worker in the Bonaire shopping center in Aldaia, explains that on Tuesday, October 29, the night of the flood, he received an email from the company in which they were given the option of going home due to the episode of rains and recover the hours in exchange at another time. However, he says: “As on other rainy days there have been no problems and they did not report anything else, we did not give it much importance and we continued working; But at 8:10 a.m. from the shopping center they told us that we had to evacuate.”
At that moment, Martínez went to look for his car, which was in the parking lot. When she arrived, the water was almost up to her waist, so she finally got into a colleague’s SUV, which is taller, and they ended up on a mound where the water had not yet reached. When it started to rise and reached them, they decided to return to the shopping center, with the water already exceeding their waists: “We went up to the restaurant and cinema floor, the highest, and there we stayed with another 300 or 400 people. The girl from the cinemas consulted with her bosses and they opened two rooms for us to spend the night, they gave us water and food.”
Regarding the situation of the underground parking, he explains that everything under the building is parking and that, according to what a security worker at the center told him, when the water level began to rise, he asked clients to seek refuge in the center and not to go down for the cars, “but many of them did not pay attention to him.” And he adds: “It is not known how many people there may be, the entire parking lot is flooded and they have not yet gone to bail out the water.”
The Aldaia City Council, where the coordination point is located, has requested machinery for the removal of vehicles (crane, elevator, backhoe), cleaning material and volunteers (if they come from outside, do not bring the vehicles into the center).
Parking in La Torre and Sedaví
In La Torre and Sedaví the residents themselves began to remove the mud from the entrances to the residential patios and the ramps of the underground parking lots, which were still flooded. Mar Pons, a neighbor of Sedaví, was this Friday morning helping to clean her brother’s bar, located on the ground floor of a building. Next to the premises is the entrance to the parking lot of the residential building with forest firefighters bailing out water with a pump. “The garage is full of cars, we don’t know what they can find. Yesterday they found a deceased woman under a car,” he says, and then adds desperately that they need “help, hands, soldiers to come, people to help us, we are alone in the town, we have nothing, we just need Help, help, bring us shovels to clean.”
Paco Casado, 68 years old and also from Sedaví, guards the access to the parking lot of his building, also completely flooded: “We left the parking door open so that it wouldn’t collapse and everything washed away by the flood could enter here, until they come. to empty it, we don’t know.”
Pablo Durán lives on the third floor in a building in La Torre. According to him, it has been “a total disaster, we were able to open the garage 15 minutes ago because it was full of mud, the garage can have capacity for 20 vehicles, we don’t know what we might find” and he assures that “in a matter of 40 In seconds the water began to rise over the curb and in 10 or 15 minutes all the garages had been filled, around 8:30 p.m.
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