The situation experienced in the last few hours in the Valencian Community keeps the residents of the most affected municipalities on edge. They will never be able to forget the images they are seeing when they go down to the street or the constant sounds of sirens that have not stopped repeating themselves around them since last Tuesday. Ana, a resident of Alfafar, one of the towns where DANA has impacted, fears for the number of people who are still missing and it is not known if they are still alive. The difficulty in searching the area and carrying out rescue tasks makes him suspect that there are bodies of people a few meters from his house, among the crowded cars. «From my window I see several cars piled up in which we don’t know if there are people or not. “No one has come to check it,” he explains to ABC in a telephone conversation, in which he cannot hide the nervousness and shock that he still carries from everything he has experienced.
The arrival of the floods, this neighbor says, caught him close to home, but in a matter of minutes it got worse. «My brother told me that the Catarroja ravine had overflowed. Five minutes before I had spoken to him and he had told me that there were still 3 meters left for it to overflow, it was very fast,” says Ana, who also explains that shortly after she lost contact with her brother, who lives in the municipality next to hers, and did not It was not until yesterday afternoon that he was able to contact the family to report that he was fine. “Only in his block, which is 200 meters away, there have been at least 14 people drowned in the garages,” he laments.
But this neighbor also has another image with bated breath that she doesn’t think she can forget. «No one has come here yet. Yesterday they took the body of a girl of about 17 years old who had been lying on the sidewalk among rubble for more than 15 years. It has been horrible to see. They put a blanket over him…On my street alone we have seen four bodies,” he laments. Ana also believes, from what she is seeing around her and her relatives, that the death toll figures known so far are still very far from reality. «There are going to be many more. “This is horrible.”
Ana remembers perfectly what she did before the water flooded the streets with force. One of the first things was to go and tell his sister, who works in a pharmacy near their house, to go home. On the way, they began to notice the effects of DANA more strongly. «Suddenly we had water up to our waists. “You can’t imagine the force with which it goes, it drags you… we were holding on to the railings, the bars of the doors as best we could… we thought the water was taking us away, but we were able to get there by crawling and holding on.” The alert to the cell phones informing about this emergency, he affirms, reached them when the water had already reached a significant level.
“It was a car cemetery”
Once at home, from his window he only heard screams and sirens and people trying to escape the consequences. «There were no tracks, they had disappeared. It was a car graveyard. A wave of cars with people screaming… Now there are tons, there are maybe 100 cars on top of each other,” he says. Ana insists that it is not known if there are people who were trapped in the vehicles. “No one has looked there and it’s been two days now.” The neighbors, this woman says, do not dare to approach because they fear that these car towers could collapse at any moment.
Beyond the material damage, which is currently in the background despite the fact that most have lost their cars and a good part of their belongings, Ana celebrates that all her relatives are fine, although the anguish continues to accompany her. Sleeping these days is not an easy task. Although they have intermittently restored electricity in their building, they are still without water, so they cannot yet clean up the damage.
But Ana believes that this tragedy, although it brings out the bad side of some people, also brings out the humanity and solidarity of many other people. «Many people from Valencia city are calling me in case we need something, to try to bring it to us. But it’s better that they don’t come. “There are wonderful people,” he points out.
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