Santiago Alvarez He left Pamplona behind and moved to Valencia a decade ago to study and work. met Xenia Guisado and he fell in love, which forced him to extend his stay in the capital of Turia indefinitely. They lived on rent in the city until their children were born. children Laia and Ángel. The four of them decided to buy a house in Catarroja last August and, just three months later, the world came crashing down on them. Their relatives, after seeing the news that came from the devastating DANAThey called them again and again but got no response. They reported their disappearance, they even thought they might have died, but finally, a week later, They have been found safe and sound.
It is told with emotion by Juan Hidalgo, Santi’s cousin, who has given his all to seek help and try to locate his relatives, alive or not. “They are lucky because they have the opportunity to start from scratch,” he tells ABC, happy to know that the four are already heading to Navarra to get away from the chaos for a couple of weeks.
Tuesday, October 29, began “like a normal day” for Santi, Xenia, Laia, and Ángel. The little ones went to school and the parents went to work. At noon, the head of the family spoke on the phone with his mother and the children’s grandmother, in a regular conversation, in which he did tell her that they had to go “quickly” to buy because “the sky looked ugly.”
They said goodbye and the afternoon passed with apparent normality. «It was the next day, when I got up and saw the images of what was happening on television when I started calling them non-stop“explains Juan, who alludes that during the first hours they knew that communications were failing and that they would have to be “very patient even though our nerves were getting the best of us.”
They kept trying for two days and there was no response. “We no longer knew whether to climb the walls or directly jump out of the window,” details the cousin in a live connection on the Bon Dia CV program on Valencian regional television. À Punt. Thus, they decided to enter the data of the four missing people on an enabled website and send their images through WhatsApp and social networks. It immediately went viral.
They spent the weekend without news until luck ran into them in the same town of Catarroja. As she explains, on Monday night Xenia went down to get plates of food at one of the distribution points set up in the town and a neighbor recognized her from the photos she had received on her cell phone. “The next day they met again and the same girl left him her mobile phone and contacted us to tell us that they were alive,” the cousin tells this newspaper.
But then, what happened? In that conversation, Juan narrates that his relative’s wife was helped by a neighbor from their same building. The four of them live in a basement. “The flood caught them on the street and an acquaintance who came down to move the car told them to go up to their house, which was a higher altitude, while the water reached their knees,” he argues.
Santiago and Xenia’s cell phones were left in their car and for the next seven days they remained in their neighbor’s house, without electricity, water and food. «Thanks to this neighbor my cousin, his wife and my nephews are alive», celebrates Juan, who points out that the company where his family member works has offered temporary work to this citizen who helped them in the most difficult times.
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