It was a busy time at the end of the day at the “Mercadona” supermarket in Paiporta (Spain), this town of 25,000 inhabitants located south of Valencia. On Tuesday, October 27, floodwaters coming from the hills after torrential rains crossed the city and rushed into the supermarket parking lot. How many customers were trapped in the hundreds of square meters of the basement? How many tried to recover their cars? How many managed to get out in time? Nobody knows, but nobody can ignore that the water reached two meters throughout the city.
For three days, priorities were elsewhere, and if there was any hope of finding survivors, they couldn’t be there, under this considerable body of water. It was also necessary to clear the passage, a tangle of cars, removing them one by one, so that firefighters could reach the scene with heavy equipment.
On Saturday morning, finally, more than three days after the torrential rains, the pumps began to evacuate the water. Thousands of cubic meters of cloudy water. “It is very long because it is very big”says Raoul Plou Martínez, a firefighter from northern Spain who came to support his colleagues from the Valencia region, completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the crisis. Two pumps have been running for eight hours and the level has dropped only one meter. “It will take days. “We fear the worst.”adds a soldier from the Military Emergency Unit (UME), an army unit specialized in relief. Only then will firefighters be able to explore the parking lot and the interior of the vehicles.
Divers explore the mud
How many missing people in the “Mercadona”? How many bodies are there in the city’s numerous underground parking lots? In those of Alfatar, Benetusser or Picanya? In the entire region? The question is on everyone’s mind, four days after the deadly floods, whose provisional toll shows 211 deaths in Valencia and another three in the rest of the country.
The authorities are displaying relative transparency, no doubt so as not to further accentuate anxiety and anger, at the risk of fueling rumors. The Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, spoke this Thursday “Dozens and dozens of missing people” while the death toll was 155. According to Spanish media, several thousand people were reported missing in the hours following the crisis, a sign of the magnitude of the chaos in the affected cities. The restoration of the media helped clear up the doubts of a large number of them, who were able to contact their loved ones, the authorities or return to their homes.
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