«There, in that house, an elderly woman has died. “He was in a wheelchair and couldn’t get to the first floor.” It was in Utiel, barely twenty-four hours after the tragedy when Diego and Nicolás – two Colombians who were trying to save what little use was left in their destroyed car next to the Magro river – already told us the profile of most of those who died in these floods. Thus, according to the data provided yesterday by the Data Integration Center (CID) of the 216 fatalities recorded in this catastrophe, over a hundred (104) were over 70 years old.
Even if we lower the threshold to 60 years of age, the figure rises to 137, much more than half of those who died. Regarding sex, the majority are men, 131 compared to 85 women, and of Spanish nationality, 190 compared to another 26 of 11 different nationalities. Among the 216 deaths there are also 9 minors, 7 of them under 11 years old.like the brothers Izan and Rubén, “els xiquets” torn from their father’s arms by the waterspout in the Más del Jutge urbanization in Torrent, as ABC reported in the first days of the tragedy.
The profile of the towns in which the bodies have been found, although they were not necessarily registered there, also corresponds to the towns that have suffered the greatest damage. «In Paiporta there are dead, in Paiporta there are dead!», Nerea tried to explain, in a desperate cry, to Queen Letizia during the frustrated visit to the town. It was Sunday and the cry of the young Journalism student showed a sad reality: five days after the tragedy, it had still not been possible to remove all the bodies.
In fact, with 45 deaths, Paiporta is the town that heads this macabre ranking, followed by Catarroja (25), the districts of Valencia (16), Alfafar (15), Massanassa (11) and Benetússer, Torrent and Picanya (with 10 deceased in each case). The highest number of deaths is concentrated in the towns crossed by the Poyo ravine, which with a flow four times that of the Ebro – in the last measurement before the flood disabled the equipment, so it was much higher – has flooded all the towns in its path. In some places, like In the houses near the riverbed in Paiporta, the water exceeded three meters.
Fina is a healthcare worker and takes care of several elderly or dependent people, helping them with daily tasks, medication and cleaning. On the afternoon of Tuesday the 29th, the flood surprised him helping a patient who has glass bones. “I was helping him put on his pajamas and get ready for bed when I heard someone banging on the door insistently,” he tells ABC. «As in that moment my patient was half naked I made him wait, but he insisted so much that in the end I had to go open the door,” he continues.
He barely could. The water was then almost up to her waist and Fina then realized the tragedy. “The girl who was knocking is the neighbor on the first floor, she is nine months pregnant, but she knew that I was there with her neighbor, who is dependent and can barely move on her own,” Fina explains to us. It is a ground floor home, in the Alcosa Park in Alfafar, one of the most depressed areas affected by the tragedy. «If he hadn’t come to warn us we would have died there, because in a few minutes the water reached the roof of the house, that’s why he came down to tell us. “We owe him our lives,” he adds.
For Fina and her patient, the story had a happy ending. With the help of the pregnant neighbor, they were able to climb to the first floor and see how the house was completely covered by water. The neighbor’s warning saved them. But more than half of those who died did not suffer the same fate, many of them trapped in the basement without the possibility of fighting against a torrent of water that entered through doors and windows, their only means of escape.
The most affected populations are part of the urban belt of the city of Valencia, which had great growth in the decades from the 60s to the 80s of the last century, with the arrival of emigration from Castilla La Mancha and Aragon. These are buildings of four to six heights, where The ground floors are usually commercial, but also residential. In these cases, the windows are protected by bars, which turned the homes into a prison from which no escape could be made.
In the area, those who bought the homes during their construction, are of retirement agewhich also explains why most of the deceased are in that age group. In this way, the ground floors and the conditions of dependency of their inhabitants became a death trap.
A circumstance that further highlights the need for an alert message that would warn of the risk of flooding with enough time to react. However, it is worth remembering that The Es-Alert was sent at 8:11 p.m. – when many of those areas were already covered with water – He only talked about avoiding displacement due to the rains and not about the real risk of flooding. Information, late and bad, that was of no use to those who were already trapped in their mousetrap.
The uselessness of that message also speaks of the fact that, in practice, it was aimed at warning of the risk of a possible break in the Forata dam, in the middle of the Magro riverbed, which has nothing to do with the Poyo ravine. . Even here he did not fulfill his goal, because he was also late. According to the list of deceased, In the towns affected by the Magro flood there are 36 deaths. Chiva, with 8, Cheste, 7, and Utiel, 6, are the most affected, although downstream towns such as Algemesí, 3, Guadassuar and L’Alcúdia, with two each, have also lost neighbors.
#elderly #escape #DANA
