The writer Santiago Posteguillo, during a conference he gave in the Senate on Hispania, recounted his experience of DANA on October 29, which surprised him in Paiporta, just 50 meters from the fateful Poyo ravine : “I saw this conference again at 6:40 a.m. on October 29 at 1 p.m., 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 hasn’t rained in Paiporta, and no one didn’t warn him.
As he says, his car is parked next to the metro station: “I made a decision that a lot of people probably made; “Go out and move the car.” They go down six floors and when they come out to the street, there is a sheet “a body of water” that covers the entire place: “It’s strange in such a short time.” Likewise, he explains that some neighbors told them that it didn’t seem like a good idea 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 I could do; What is impressive is that in thirteen minutes there was a brutal torrent of two meters of water without control, dragging down branches, trees, cars… everything,” says Posteguillo, who reports that the The flood swept away an industrial warehouse which was located opposite the building in which they were located. From this construction, the gate, the entire front wall, the wall with the neighboring premises, the adjoining premises were swept 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 person. Yes, there was the corpse, in the middle of the square, of a young Chinese girl whom I remember having bought once in her bar and with whom I exchanged a few 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; “He gets up, no one comes, there is no one… they only removed the body a little further away, in a cellar that the neighbors were able to empty.”
“How come no one comes in 48 hours?”, he asks himself: “Can someone explain to me?”. In Spain, in the 21st century. The writer born in the Valencian town of Puçol emphasizes that he made a few calls, “to calculate the battery reserve of his cell phone and to recharge the phone with the computer I use to write the novel, because it there was no electricity”: “You have to think carefully about calls, so I called the army. I can’t say what they said to 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 no one was there, when the volunteers began to arrive, I took what a writer takes into a devastated area, the computer on which I am writing the novel; my notes from Caesar’s third novel; My partner did the same thing, a few clothes… And we dragged this suitcase for miles and miles through a spectacle of devastation like I’ve never seen in my life, like I don’t think that people can imagine it; Seeing people who, because there was a garden hose, were lining up with buckets for water, corpses that they had not yet been able to remove, overturned cars, all the buildings destroyed… Until we walked to Valencia, where I have an apartment.”
“You can’t imagine what these people are going through; “They cannot conceive the level and the feeling that people feel in all these towns – Paiporta, Algemesí, Catarroja, Alfafar… – because the necessary institutional help is not provided, because the people who have shovels can’t,” he says. Posteguillo, who recalls that there are already cases of infectious diseases because the streets are not cleaned with the necessary speed. “Please, whatever your influence, small or large, fight so that this does not happen”, pleads the successful Valencian author: “It was very cruel not to warn, but it is still crueler not to help solve the problem. the energy that is needed.
Posteguillo, who recognizes himself as privileged due to his personal situation, points out that there are many elderly people who lived on the ground floor “who cannot or do not know how to complete the documents to be completed.” “How long do these people have to wait for help? » he asks, and he insists: “How can institutions be so miserable? “They have no idea what people are going through.”
The writer expert in Roman history concludes by recalling how politicians stabbed and killed each other in the first century AD: “and now I am going to make a generalization that I find unfair; The feeling in every town I come from is that 21st century politicians are stabbing people,” and he eventually remembered Machado saying, “The feeling there is is is that the two Spains freeze our hearts”.
