The writer Santiago Posteguillo, during a conference he was giving in the Senate about Hispania, told his experience about the DANA on October 29, which caught him in Paiporta just 50 meters from the fateful Poyo ravine: “I was reviewing this conference 6:40 p.m. on October 29, and my partner interrupts me because his sister says we should go up to the terrace, 50 meters from the Poyo ravine, which is overflowing, and it has not rained in Paiporta, and no one has warned.”
As he says, he has his car parked next to the subway station: “I made a decision that probably many people made; “Go out and move the car.” They go down six floors and when they go out onto the street there is a sheet “a span of water” that covers the entire square: “That is strange in such a short time.” Likewise, he explains that some neighbors told them that it did not seem like a good idea for them to go out and move the vehicle: “We made the decision not to move the car.”
“I found the car four days later a kilometer from where I had parked it, but that’s the least of it; The impressive thing is that in thirteen minutes there was a brutal torrent of two meters of water without control dragging branches, trees, cars… everything,” says Posteguillo, who reports that the flood swept away an industrial warehouse that was in front of the building. in which they were. From this construction, the portal door, the entire façade wall, the wall with the premises next door, the adjoining premises were taken away…: “I was afraid for the structure of the building, six hours of non-stop flooding” .
“We went to bed without electricity or water,” he continues, “thinking that, logically, at dawn the Civil Guard, the Army, the firefighters would be there… But at dawn there was no one. Yes, there was the corpse, in the middle of the square, of a young Chinese woman whom I remember having bought from in her bar once and with whom I have exchanged some smiles; and next to him his mother, watching over the corpse.” “No one came for a whole day,” he emphasizes: “The cars were overturned, everything was full of mud, silence, fear… Night falls, no one comes; there is looting; “It dawns, no one comes, there is no one… they have only removed the body a little further in, in a basement that the neighbors have been able to empty.”
“How can it be that no one comes in 48 hours?” he asks himself: “Can someone explain it to me? In Spain, in the 21st century.” The writer born in the Valencian town of Puçol points out that he made some calls, “calculating the cell phone battery reserve and recharging the phone with the computer that I use to write the novel, because there was no electricity”: “You have to think very carefully. the calls, so I made a call to the Army. I can’t say what they told me, only that when I hung up I told my partner ‘we have to get out of here on our own.'”
“At the third dawn when there was no one, when volunteers began to arrive, I took what a writer takes in a devastated area, the computer where I write the novel; my notes from César’s third novel; My partner did the same, a little clothes… And we dragged that suitcase for miles and miles through a spectacle of devastation like I have never seen in my life, like I don’t think people can imagine; Seeing people who, because there was a hose, had queued up with buckets to get water, corpses that they had not yet been able to remove, overturned cars, all the destroyed buildings… Until we walked to Valencia, where I have an apartment.”
“You can’t imagine what those people are going through; “They cannot conceive the level and feeling that the people have in all those towns – Paiporta, Algemesí, Catarroja, Alfafar… – because the institutional help that is needed is not being provided, because the people with shovels cannot,” he indicates. Posteguillo, who remembers that there are already cases of infectious diseases because the streets are not being cleaned with the necessary speed. “Please, in whatever small or big influence you may have, fight so that this is not the case,” pleads the successful Valencian author: “It has been very cruel not to warn, but it is even more cruel not to help with the energy that is needed.” ”.
Posteguillo, who recognizes himself as privileged due to his personal situation, points out that there are many older people who lived on ground floors “who cannot or do not know how to fill out the documentation that must be filled out.” “How long do these people have to wait for help?” he asks, and insists, “how can institutions be so miserable? “They have no idea what people are going through.”
The writer who is an expert in Roman history concludes by recalling how politicians stabbed each other and killed each other in the first century AD, “and now I am going to make a generalization that I think is unfair; The feeling that exists in all the towns where I come from is that the politicians of the 21st century stab the people”, and ends up remembering Machado to say: “The feeling that there is is that the two Spains are freezing our hearts.”
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