There are cars stuck against houses, windows or building facades. Even when stacked, generating mountains of scrap metal that prevent access to streets or avenues. There are also others stuck on farms or on the boulevards. The work of the cranes proves crucial in eliminating these apocalyptic images left by DANA, after destroy some 120,000 vehicles according to the Valencia Chamber of Commercesince its removal is essential to resume mobility or for access of heavy machinery to the clean zero point.
There is a legion of crane operators deployed by insurance companies, by the municipal services of the orchard towns of Valencia devastated by the worst flood of the century, and even by the army. But also There are volunteers who mobilized the cranes of workshops or car dealerships, work for free, participating in a task as titanic as it is complicated by the location and condition of thousands of vehicles.
“In normal service, It takes 15 minutes to remove a wrecked car, but in these conditions, it sometimes takes 3 hours to remove just one.“, graphically illustrates Óscar Simó, director of AutoDos and Estilar Reformas de Gandía, become one of the volunteers who went to Ground Zero, with their Renault Master tow truck and a Toyota 4×4 capable of towing vehicles.
– What was the working environment you encountered with your crane?
-Oscar Simó: I was in Paiporta and Catarroja. The panorama is crazy. I was afraid that I might find a body in one of the vehicles we had removed. I hope that such a disaster will never happen again.
VIDEO | Oscar Simó, one of the volunteers who contributed to the removal of vehicles in municipalities like Paiporta and Catarroja.
Tuesday October 29 has become one of the most tragic dates in the history of Spain due to the 214 deaths that DANA has already cost Valencia, The Barranco del Poyo carried a flow rate five times that of the Ebro.according to the University Research Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering.
The force of the flood caused death, chaos and destruction during his passage through the villages of the Valencian countryside, partly because of the vehicles he was dragging and which are still blocked in certain places today. Hence the importance of the work carried out by volunteers like businessman Óscar Simó who work to remove the cars.
“An average vehicle weighs around 1,500 kilos, but with water and mud, this weight is around 3,000 kilos.“, according to the director of AutoDos and Estilar Reformas based in Gandía. This information explains that thirteen days later, there are still cars piled up in the streets. “The winch The crane’s hydraulic system smokes as much as the muddy vehicles weigh. “Taking out two cars a day is an achievement.”
A Nissan Juke, destroyed by DANA, removed by the AutoDos company tow truck in Gandía.
In fact, this businessman admits that only He was able to collect 7 cars during his trip to Paiporta and 5 more during his trip to Catarroja.with the personnel he mobilized in his Renault Master tow truck and a Toyota 4×4 in the first days after DANA. “When you arrived at a private garage or neighborhood community, the first thing you had to do was install a pump to drain the water,” remembers Óscar Simó. All this, after having taken on the difficult task of verifying that there was no death in the parking lot or in the car in question.
-How did they act after checking that there was no body?
-Oscar Simó: After emptying the garage, eI The work is very complicated because the cars have broken wheels, the brakes and steering wheel are blocked and they lack traction. So we used the off-road vehicle to tow the vehicle, but they weigh more because of the mud and water, and you can’t maneuver them like in a normal situation, so you hook a cable first on the side or front of the vehicle. car, to pull and slide it as much as you can, until you place it on the garage ramp.
Then we put the winch on it to take it out to the street with the crane. It took us two or three hours to get a car out of a private garage in Paiporta. So we couldn’t provide many services. In addition, I punctured the Toyota 4×4 twice and the tow truck once because there were many pieces of wood with nails hidden by the mud.
-How do you feel when you go to help and discover the harsh reality that it takes hours to extract a single car?
– I felt frustration, sadness and discomfort seeing how people were doing. They had lost everything. There were overturned and destroyed cars. It was impossible to know what brand some of the vehicles were.
Vehicles buried in Cheste, due to DANA.
Although few cars are removed by volunteers equipped with cranes, like Óscar Simó, the truth is that It is essential to clear the streets of the villages of the Valencian countryside, so that they can recover the asphalt now invaded by a quagmire that can cause health problems and that generates a desolate panorama with psychological effects for its neighbors.
“When I was in Paiporta on Sunday, if there weren’t a hundred cranes there wouldn’t be any, but we couldn’t get away with it“, deplores this businessman, 49 years old. “We helped as much as we could.” The proof is that this legion of crane operators, including professionals from insurance companies and workshop volunteers, did their “grain of sand” to unblock the public roads of Paiporta: one of the most punished cities by DANA with more than fifty deaths.
– Was the work protocol different from that of the garages?
-Oscar Simó: It takes less time to take a car off the street than to take it out of a garage. Vehicles pile up on the public highway, there is only one free lane and we have to invent things to get rid of them because sometimes we find cars embedded in the facades of houses, stuck between the road signs and the street lights… But you just have to do it. carefully pull the winch until you leave them within range of the tractors towing them.
Some vehicles destroyed by DANA have appeared perched on orange treesas happened to a Civil Guard patrol car, worth more than 30,000 euros, belonging to the vehicle fleet of the Paiporta station. The work of crane operators, who removed mountains of private cars in this town in the Huerta Sur region, also made it possible to locate three other patrol cars buried by private cars. Even if it’s the least of things, because in this barracks we are still mourning the death of the girlfriend of the second lieutenant and an agent, drowned in the garage.
Two of the patrol cars from the Paiporta Civil Guard station that were located after the DANA.
Óscar Simó did not hesitate to walk away from the companies he has run since 2006, to roll up his sleeves and literally fall into the mud, risk their equipmentto mobilize as a volunteer the day after DANA. On Wednesday October 30, he began using the means available to him at AutoDos, his workshopassignee used vehicles, as well as tools Style reforms. He first made forays with his 1980s Toyota to bring food to areas cut off by flooding, then he carried a 1,000 liter tank of water and the last thing he did was been towing vehicles in Paiporta and Catarroja.
But there is still much to do. The proof is the panorama that they had this Monday in Sedaví, the city that has toured the world, occupying the covers of the international press, such as he Corriere della Sera, with its avenue Docteur Gómez Ferrer, completely collapsed by dozens of stacked cars, as a symbol of the devastation of DANA in Valencia. “Here there are mountains and mountains of cars in the streets“, they denounce with indignation of the Hierros y Metales Pallardó scrapyard.
“The city is full of cranes: there are forty thousand of them in the streets“, they add of the Sedaví scrapyard. At the Insurance Compensation Consortium, we are talking about 70,000 files of cars damaged by DANA; other official sources increase the number of vehicles affected to 100,000; even to 120,000 of the Chamber of Commerce of Valencia What seems clear is that it is. legion of crane operators who are deployed and who are obliged to deposit the muddy cars in any place where they do not disturb.
A mountain of cars in a street in Sedavía after the DANA on Tuesday October 29.
In Catarroja, scrapyards are improvised in open fields in areas which were to house future urban developments; near the IKEA in Alfafar there is a temporary camp of damaged cars… Up to 76 points have been activated in the province of Valenciafor a fleet of 70 cranes and 100 people, coordinated by the UME, to remove the mass of vehicles that marks a very discouraging landscape for residents affected by a disaster that threatens to end the political career of the President of the Generalitat Valencian: Carlos Mazón.
To put an end to such a waste of chassis, businessman Óscar Simó warns that drastic measures must be taken: “The working conditions of cranes and heavy machinery are very complicated, because in many cities only part of the streets are clear, and you have to maneuver very carefully with the crane, so as not to crush the volunteers who are on foot and passing behind you.
“The truth is that more organization is needed because on weekends there are so many volunteers that they collapse everything and that doesn’t help. The work of the machines is delayed by removing the cars, the mountains of furniture and in some streets there is already accumulated waste and it smells very bad. The army and the state must intervene to take over the organization to remove everything that has accumulated in the streets.
