One week after the DANA When Valencia was devastated, indignation and anger grew among citizens and mayors of neighboring towns. José Javier Sanchís, first mayor of Algemesione of the towns inundated by the floods, said in an interview with La Hora de la 1 that she felt very alone in the face of this tragedy.
While emphasizing that “it is not about finding culprits”, he regretted that they had not been informed of what was happening in the reports. “I received a call at noon telling me that they were paying attention to the river, that they were going to meet again and that at the end of the meeting they would call me back. This is the time I’m waiting for this call and this call was from the Government Delegation. Until now, I have not wanted to blame one or the other, because everyone has their part to assume. I won’t defend anyone. Neither to mine, nor to the opposition because no one here came to defend us,” said the mayor of the Popular Party, visibly indignant.
Furthermore, Sanchís points out that no one warned them that water would escape from the Forata Marshes nor that they would increase flows. “I want to make this clear. Nobody warned us here,” he stressed.
The mayor explained that the municipal council, due to the yellow alert of Aemet for a possible Dana, called its municipal emergency plan on Sunday at 11 a.m. because the forecasts called for torrential rains.
As the manager details, Algemesí is a city that accumulates water in its streets during intense rains because it is very flat and the sewer system is not prepared to absorb it. “In anticipation of simple torrential rains, with the means at our disposal, we mobilized and tried to alert the population of the arrival of heavy rains. We were planning this a few days before the episode. Could no one have warned that the river was going to overflow? Nobody knew? Couldn’t they have warned us?“, exclaimed Sanchís on TVE.
“Our weapons these days have been my cell phone, my local police and my municipal brigade”
José Javier Sanchis
Mayor of Algemesi
The mayor seemed overwhelmed and assured that he had done everything in his power from the start of the weather emergency until today. “I am a simple mayor. And here we have simple advisors and our weapons these days have been my cell phone, my local police and my municipal brigade. These are our weapons. I don’t have EMUs, I don’t have trucks, I don’t have dump trucks, I don’t have excavators. My police cars broke down the first night. I don’t have a sound system. I don’t have these resources“, he lamented.
Sanchís insists that the overflowing of the river could not be prevented, but that it could have been prevented more in advance. “I I was able to notify my neighbors at 5 p.m. because I had two inches of rainwater in the streets and I was able to warn businessmen to evacuate industrial areas because it was raining on them without knowing the river. “If we hadn’t warned them, I don’t know what would have happened,” he said.
Beyond political responsibilities, the mayor thanked the volunteers and the teams who came to help. “People were very involved, the solidarity demonstrations overflowed. Thanks in part to them, Algemesí can feed its population,” he said.
Helplessness and rage
The mayor, who experienced the flood himself, assures that there is “a lot of helplessness and a lot of anger”: “We have all lost something. My police officers and my brigade have been there from the start. Helping people and these people and we also have family in our homes and we also have our problems. And we put them aside to prioritize management that suits us“.
Finally, the official took advantage of the microphones of Spanish television to request that the Military Emergency Unit (UME) continue to work in Algemesí. “If the resources do not continue to arrive and, above all, if the EMU does not stay in our city for a few more days, this will be impossible,” he concluded.
