A call, a message or a simple sentence. Life can change you in an instant. Carlos Yárnoz, commissioner for citizen security of the local policeyou know it well. A week ago, he spent the most painful three hours of his life trying to find out if his relatives and neighbors in Torrent were okay. after Dana. Now he finds himself in Valencewith twenty other provincial police officers, helping the victims of the natural disaster.
“On Monday afternoon, when I saw on the news what was happening in Valence“I almost had a heart attack,” confesses this regional police officer. His cousin lives in Torrent with her family. “He has a son with cerebral palsy. He called him and he didn’t come to get me. I imagined that maybe he had gone looking for my nephew and that made me very badly,” he laments.
three hours of incessant unanswered calls which had a happy ending in the form of a text message: “Hello Carlos. We are fine. There is no cover-up.”
Just a few days after this episode which It looked like something out of a horror movie.the Government of Navarra has decided send 30 firefighters and around twenty police officers to ground zero of the disaster to support local authorities. Among them, Yárnoz himself. “My cousin already warned me that we weren’t prepared for what we were going to find.”
From the first moment, Yárnoz and his companions were clear that in Valencia they had to be self-sufficient. They didn’t want to bother in the middle of a disaster with thousands of people affected. “I started calling my family and friends to find a place to sleep,” he says.
The solution came from the hand of Avapace (Valencian Association for Help with Cerebral Palsy)an entity to which his nephew is linked. “They left their headquarters to us and they are behaving wonderfully,” he thanks. And this shows that the Valencians, even if they have lost everything, turn to the people who will help them. “The first day, we slept on mats, but the next day, when we arrived at night, we discovered that they had put pillows on us,” he illustrates.
Avapace’s head office is located in the city of Valence. Displaced regional firefighters and police officers travel back and forth from the capital to the most affected areas every day. “The contrast is very impressive. In Valencia, life goes on and you can even see people on the terraces. But you drive fifteen kilometers and the landscape is Dantean,” he confirms.
He was asked if he had seen anything similar in his long career as a regional police officerstay silent. His mind goes back some 34 years, when he was on patrol with the father of the journalist who writes these lines: “In those days, when we arrived at a road accident, it was relatively common that we found five dead, for example. . Your father and I looked in the rearview mirror and saw 90 degrees of horror. Here is a 360 degree disaster. Wherever you look.”
It’s silence again. And just afterwards, he responds more directly, in a voice broken by emotion: “No, I hadn’t seen anything like it. “I wish with all my might I never have to see him again.”
The group of regional police began working on the ground this Monday: “We were first in Picaña to carry out access controls with the aim of preventing the roads from collapsing,” explains the Citizen Security Commissioner. Later they moved to Paiporta, a town where they were assigned an area of responsibility. “We are coordinate heavy machinery. There is no sidewalk and people walk on the road,” he said.
But their work goes much further. “We actually do a little bit of everything,” he admits. “Today we cleaned up a lot of trash. It’s a joy because you ask for help and it appears many people ready to collaborate“In fact, they managed to recruit around 40 volunteers to do by hand what the machines couldn’t do.
“We are also helping many elderly people. We took a man to the hospital. “I’ve had a broken bone since DANA day,” he says. This is just one of the many human stories he has experienced these days. “We cried a lot,” he said. “I helped a woman through this ordeal. A slippery patch. He hugged me while crying. “We were excited.”
These days, his working day has been extended. “We left at eight in the morning and returned after eight in the afternoon,” he emphasizes. And he insists he doesn’t care. Everything is to help the victims of DANA. “Yesterday, Monday, we couldn’t eat until 7:30 p.m. And because of the adrenaline, we weren’t even hungry.”
“These people have nothing left”he comments with disgust. “In Paiporta, there are no more businesses. They were all destroyed by DANA,” he laments. “They lost everything.”
Yárnoz will stay Paiporta until Friday, when help from Navarre should arrive. Exactly, this Wednesday, The Foral Police announced that they would send the seized material to Valencia to people arrested for various crimes who can help with cleanup efforts.
Concretely, as the police broadcast on their social networks, it is a question of tools such as shears, hammers, mallets, picks or levers, among others. Some of them “with express authorization, since they are under judicial custody”, such as motor pumps, water pumps, pipes or hydraulic hammers, among others.
“I feel guilty”
Yárnoz ends the conversation with a confession that makes your hair stand on end: “I feel guilty”. And he explains it. “These days, I thought a lot and came to a conclusion. We have failed as a society“.
In this sense, he insists on the fact that it is not a question of blaming one or the other: “Here, we all failed. Maybe the politicians a little more, okay. But so do the citizens,” he adds. And he continues: “We lived very well and nature put us in our place.”
This regional police officer is already looking to the future: “When everything is clean, the hardest part will begin. Little by little, we will have to start from scratch. And then we’ll have to add them all. “It’s not worth subtracting.”
