The number of dead left by DANA has already reached 202 people, as confirmed by Cecopi (Emergency Coordination Center), while there are still 1,900 people missing, or 112. parking lots, both in the centers commercial and supermarkets as well as in the residential buildings themselves in the affected areas, as elDiario.es verified on site in the La Torre neighborhood and in Sedaví.
Eduardo Martínez, a Primark employee at the Bonaire shopping center in Aldaia, explains that on Tuesday October 29, the night of the flood, he received an email from the company in which they had the option of returning home due to of the raining episode and recovers the hours in exchange at another time. However, he says: “Like other rainy days, there were no problems and they did not report anything else, we did not give it much importance and continued to work; But at 8:10 a.m. at the mall, they told us we had to evacuate.”
At that point, Martínez went to get his car, which was in the parking lot. When she arrived, the water was almost waist deep, so she eventually got into a co-worker’s SUV, which is larger, and they ended up on a mound where the water hadn’t yet reached. When the water started to rise and reached them, they decided to return to the shopping center, the water already above their waists: “We went up to the restaurant and cinema floor, the highest, and we stayed there with 300 or 400 other people. . The girl from the cinema consulted her bosses and they opened two rooms for us to spend the night, they gave us water and food.
Regarding the underground parking situation, he explains that everything under the building is a parking lot and that, according to what a security guard at the center told him, when the water level started to rise, he asked the customers to take refuge in the center and not to go down to look for the cars, “but many of them did not pay attention to him.” And he adds: “We don’t know how many people there could be, the whole parking lot is flooded and they haven’t gone to empty the water yet.”
The Aldaia Town Hall, where the coordination point is located, has requested machines for the removal of vehicles (crane, fenwick, elevator, backhoe), cleaning equipment and volunteers (if they come from outside , do not bring vehicles into the center). .
Parking in La Torre and Sedavi
In La Torre and Sedaví, residents themselves began to remove mud from the entrances to residential patios and from the ramps of underground parking lots, which were still flooded. Mar Pons, a neighbor of Sedaví, was helping this Friday morning to clean her brother’s bar, located on the ground floor of a building. Next to the premises is the entrance to the parking lot of the residential building with forest firefighters emptying the water with a pump. “The garage is full of cars, we don’t know what they might find. Yesterday they found a dead woman under a car,” he says, then adds desperately that they need “help, hands, soldiers, people to help us, we are alone in town, we we have nothing, we just need help”. , help us, bring us shovels to clean.
Paco Casado, 68 years old and also from Sedaví, monitors access to the parking lot of his building, which is also completely flooded: “We left the parking door open so that it does not collapse and everything that has been washed away by the flood can enter here. , until they come and empty it, we don’t know.
Pablo Durán lives on the third floor of a building in La Torre. According to him, it was “a total disaster, we were able to open the garage 15 minutes ago because it was full of mud, the garage can have a capacity of 20 vehicles, we don’t know what we might find” and he assures that “in 40 seconds the water began to rise over the sidewalk and in 10 or 15 minutes all the garages were full, around 8:30 p.m.”.
As reported by elDiario.es, the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) of the Generalitat Valenciana, the institutional epicenter of the response to the disaster, manages a provisional figure of 1,900 missing people, registered on the activated telephone number for people trying to locate their loved ones. .
