The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, gave a rather gloomy assessment for the recovery of Valencia’s transport network after the passage of DANA. At a press conference, the first thing he demanded was that no attempt be made to enter or exit Valencia by road unless strictly necessary. “The damage is enormous,” he said. “The recommendation is that they don’t try to go in or out because they’re making our priority tasks difficult,” which includes finding people who are still missing. “Any mobility that is not strictly necessary is not recommended.”
Puente acknowledged that much of the road network “is seriously damaged.” This is “very significant damage whose replacement will be very expensive, not only financially, but also in effort and time”. For example, resuming traffic on the A-7 may take months, or removing stuck cars will take months.
Elements are still missing to establish a complete diagnosis, but there are obvious problems, such as the collapse of the bridge on the A-7, the Valencia ring road, which normally receives 100,000 vehicles per day. “It will be very difficult to get this road back to normal.” “We will try to travel via V-30 and V-31, where some of the traffic has been recovered. In total, the affected kilometers of the state network are 80 where “there are mountains of vehicles”.
On the railway, part of the high-speed tunnel between Madrid and Valencia “disappeared”. “We will have to replace 1.2 kilometers of network infrastructure”, moreover, another part of the tunnel is “completely flooded” and it is not yet possible to know “how far the damage extends”. “Let’s see what we find,” he supposed.
Cercanías’ situation “is very serious”
“The broadband network will not resume this Monday. We’ll see in two or three weeks, that’s the minimum time for the work if we don’t find anything more serious,” he stressed. “We have to raise the tracks and that will take time,” he said. he pointed out. In addition, it is difficult to reach the damage, because the tunnel is inoperable. “Depending on what we find in the tunnel, we will set other deadlines.”
“If the high speed situation is serious, the situation in Cercanías is very serious,” said the minister. “Of the five lines, three are missing, C1, C2 and C3. We don’t have them, in C3, 45 kilometers are completely destroyed.” The other two lines, however, will try to recover as quickly as possible, including the Euromed train to Barcelona.
Looking ahead to the coming weeks, Puente indicated that the priority work is “clearing the roads and removing the cars, not only is the Ministry of Transportation involved, but we also have the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior” . “Unfortunately, there are people inside and the judicial authorities must intervene,” he explained.
Currently, there is no economic “calculation” of the potential cost of DANA’s impact on infrastructure. “We’re not going to skimp. We will deploy all necessary economic means. We will make the effort that must be made,” Puente said.
He also did not want to get into a controversy over when notices reached citizens. “I’m not going to go any further, there will be time.”
