Santiago Alvarez He left Pamplona and moved to Valencia ten years ago to study and work. encounter Xenia Guisado and he fell in love, which forced him to prolong his stay in the capital of Turia indefinitely. They lived on rent in the city until their children were born. children Laia and Ángel. The four of them decided to buy a house in Catarroja last August, and three months later the world came crashing down on them. Their relatives, after seeing the news coming from the devastating DANA, called them again and again but got no response. They reported them missing, they even thought maybe they were dead, but finally, a week later, They were found safe and sound.
It is told with emotion by Juan Hidalgo, Santi’s cousin, who gave everything to ask for help and try to find his loved ones, alive or not. “They are lucky because they have the opportunity to start from scratch,” he tells ABC, happy to know that the four are already heading to Navarre to escape the chaos of a few weeks.
Tuesday October 29 started “like a normal day” for Santi, Xenia, Laia and Ángel. The little ones went to school and the parents worked. At noon, the head of the family spoke on the telephone with his mother and the children’s grandmother, in a regular conversation, during which he told her that they had to go “quickly” to buy because “the The sky was ugly.
They said goodbye and the afternoon passed with apparent normality. “It was the next day when I got up and saw the images of what was happening on television when I started calling them constantly“, explains Juan, who alludes to the fact that during the first hours they knew that communications were failing and that they would have to be “very patient even if our nerves were getting the better of us.”
They kept trying for two days and there was no response. “We no longer knew whether to climb the walls or jump directly out of the window,” explains the cousin live on the show Bon Dia CV on Valencian regional television. In Punt. So, they decided to enter the data of the four missing people on an activated website and send their images via WhatsApp and social media. It immediately went viral.
They spent the weekend without news until luck fell on them in the same town of Catarroja. As she explains, on Monday evening, Xenia went down to collect plates of food from one of the distribution points set up in the city and a neighbor recognized her from the photos she had received on her cell phone. “The next day, they saw each other again and the same girl left her cell phone with him and contacted us to tell us that they were alive,” the cousin told the newspaper.
But then, what happened? In this conversation, Juan recounts that his relative’s wife was helped by a neighbor in the same building. The four of them live in a basement. “The flood surprised them in the street and an acquaintance who came down to move the car told them to go up to their house, which was at a higher altitude, while the water reached their knees,” says -he.
Santiago and Xenia’s cell phones were left in their car and for the next seven days they stayed in their neighbor’s house, without electricity, water or food. “Thanks to this neighbor my cousin, his wife and my nephews are alive», celebrates Juan, who points out that the company where a member of his family works offered temporary work to this citizen who helped them in the most difficult times.
