The brothers Carmen and Antonio Molina assumed their death on the day that the Los Pinos urbanization, on 4 Lugo Street in Godelleta, an agricultural town located about 30 kilometers from Valencia, was devastated by the floods caused by DANA on 29 October. “We have come this far,” said Antonio, 53, to his neighbor Vicente Cabrera, 70, at some point during the more than three and a half hours in which they clung to two columns of a chalet while the torrent of Water surrounded them above their waists. “Once you accept it, calm comes. I was alone and I said goodbye to everyone,” says Carmen with a trembling voice as she shows a notebook in which she has written what happened the day she died and was reborn.
The walls of the ground floor of Carmen’s semi-detached house are marked by the brown water that entered wildly until reaching a height of more than two meters. Carmen was in the kitchen around 5:00 p.m. when she saw that the flood was flooding her home and the closed windows could break. And they did it. “Quickly, I went up to the second floor. In a few seconds the sofa in my house was floating and the water was rising up the stairs.”
Since she barely had coverage in those fateful hours, this 55-year-old teacher knocked on the wall she shares with her father Antonio’s house, about to turn 80, to see if he was okay. Fortunately, he was: he stayed on the second floor all afternoon. Since he didn’t know anything about his brother, he took a flashlight to signal to his chalet, located opposite, and got a response, that of his nephew. He heard from his brother around 9:00 p.m., when the water raft had already lowered and from the balcony he shouted to him:
– “Is that you, Antonio?”
– “Yes, it’s me.”
Days after the flood and with the incessant cleaning work, the Molina family is clear: “We are leaving, the floods are becoming more and more beasts.” What’s more, “of the 12 homes that we are in this neighborhood community, I think practically all of us are leaving,” says Antonio.
In the last seven years, this small urbanization located near the Juncar ravine and very close to a stream through which the water flows so that the local road CV-424 that connects with Buñol does not flood, has suffered the material consequences of three attacks of water that descended through these two channels overflowed by torrential rains. In 2018, “the water entered a hand’s breadth”; in the second, in 2020, “it was one and a half meters outside the house and inside, half a meter”; and “the latter has almost been fatal.”
Antonio Molina and his son Toni hug each other as they remember the afternoon and night of the floods that devastated their home. Antonio spent more than 3 hours clinging to an outside column trying to resist the force of the water. | Santi Donaire
“We cannot live with the fear of the rain and risk dying,” confesses Antonio, who cries of helplessness and rage, while hugging his eldest son Toni, 32 years old, with whom he works as a carpenter. “If this becomes more and more frequent, are we going to be here until we are wiped out?”
Chalets built on floodplains
According to municipal sources, of the more than 4,000 people registered in the municipality of Godelleta, nearly 2,000 reside outside the urban center, in chalets located in urbanizations and scattered around -homes grouped in a place that is not considered a population center-.
The urbanization in which the Molina family has lived until now is 6 kilometers from the town, where they have barely suffered damage from DANA, while this area, in which there are other urbanizations and scattered through the ravines of Murtal and of the Gallego that flow kilometers down the Rambla del Poyo, is ground zero of the catastrophe in Godelleta.
“When they gave us the keys in March 2005 we didn’t know there were ravines here. Over time, people have told me that years ago this had been flooded. I buy from a developer that has permission from the City Council to build houses to be inhabited, because I trust them,” says Carmen. “But of course, in the middle of the real estate bubble… I’ll leave it there, okay?”
On January 28, 2003, the date on which the Generalitat approved the Territorial Action Plan on the prevention of Flood Risk in the Valencian Community (PATRICOVA), it was found that in Godelleta There were no “areas affected by flood risk in the municipality”that is, in the case of floods, it was not considered that they could cause damage to people, property and human activities. In the last review of the PATRICOVA, approved in October 2015, areas of risk of geomorphological danger were indicated in the municipal area, that is, the probability of flooding in certain forms (valleys, ravines, disappearance of channels, etc.) and The document confirmed again that there was no risk of flooding.
In the case of the Los Pinos urbanization, according to PATRICOVAis only marked as a geomorphological danger zone and not as at risk of flooding, despite the fact that the homes have suffered material damage from three floods since 2018 and several residents feared losing their lives on October 29.
According to one of the purchase and sale documents for Carmen Molina’s home signed in November 2004 with the real estate agency Avance Inmobiliario del Este SL., it is specified how the building license was granted in a commission of the Godelleta town council held on March 11 2003, a month or so after the approval of PATRICOVA.
The Godelleta City Council alleges that “the licenses granted in said area” were awarded based on the General Urban Planning Plan of 1988, prior to PATRICOVA and still in force -with modifications until 2018 -, and that since 2007 “they have not granted any license to build new buildings such as Los Pinos or Alameda [área con un restaurante y chalets aledaño, que también sufrió graves destrozos hace dos semanas] in those areas.”
Lack of information and late solutions
In January 2022, a neighbor of the Molina family, Marina Gandía Vergara, and her partner bought a villa in Los Pinos through the intermediation of the real estate agency Vostra Casa for 165,000 euros. “I’m from Alaquas and my boyfriend is from Xirivella, small towns 20 minutes by car from here. We liked the area, which was a closed community of neighbors and gave us security,” he says by phone.
“It was at the first neighborhood meeting when we found out about the floods,” he remembers. The insurance consortium had compensated the community to repair walls and the septic tank that had been damaged after the 2020 flood. “This information was hidden from us by the real estate agency because, if we had known, we would not have gotten into this house ”, he assures. In this regard, Vostra Casa responds by email saying that they have not been “promoters or builders of these homes” and refer this newspaper to speak with the council to see if it can provide more information.
The young couple – both are 30 years old – presented a letter to the City Council to confirm that Residencial Los Pinos was a flood zone and that it had suffered damage. They point out that the answer they obtained was that the urbanization had suffered the floods of 2018 and 2020. After the flood two weeks ago, they have put the case in the hands of their lawyers. “We can’t live here and we have many years left on our mortgage.”
In a meeting held on November 6 between representatives of this neighborhood community and the Godelleta City Council, they were informed of the public aid they could request for the damage caused to their homes. Two days before, a resident of this community, representing the 12 homes, presented a request to the council to transmit the request that the urbanization be recognized as an uninhabitable area and that they be compensated for the total value of the property.
“If they leave there it cannot be sold, right now they are near the bed of the Juncar ravine,” says the mayor of Godelleta, María Amparo Pardo Luján. “In 2020 [en aquel momento era concejala de urbanismo] It was proposed to make a detour so that this urbanization would no longer be the channel of this ravine. If we rerouted it a little earlier, it would stop passing by there. It is a very expensive project and it has been on the table since then, but they have to do it from the ministry because they are the ones who have the economic resources.”
Sources from the Department of Agriculture of the Generalitat affirm that the powers of this project lie with the City Council, which in turn must have the approval of the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), and that from the General Directorate of Water there is a collaboration. “Right now the channeling of this ravine is in the process of being studied,” they point out, “although after DANA it will be a priority to prevent these areas from flooding again.”
While responsibility is derived from the public administration, the tenants of Los Pinos prepare the documentation and carry out all the processes to get compensation to help them start from scratch in another place away from ravines and flood zones. They have relocated as best they could to the homes of family and friends, just as thousands of people affected by DANA have done in other towns in Valencia, and only two families have slept on the second floor of the house during these two weeks because They have many animals.
Carmen Molina has managed to rent an apartment in Cheste, after sleeping in four different houses. His brother Antonio is at his sister-in-law’s house. His father went to live in a one-bedroom apartment with another of his brothers in Quart de Poblet, a town where he lived part of his life with his children and which they left in 2005 in search of “more tranquility.”
“They say that because of what has happened to us we are climate refugees, Carmen,” Antonio says goodbye, while he does not stop moving from one place to another helping to repair his house and those of his neighbors.
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