It was half past five in the morning when José Fernández Sánchezhis son and his two neighbors saw a light in the sky, the only one for miles around. They had been on the roof of one of the houses in their Manises neighborhood for 8 hours, experiencing the apocalyptic passage of DANA. The wild flood of water and mud had long since swallowed up everything around them except them when it appeared. maritime rescue helicopter to save them.
For the pilots, it was literally as if they had just found an island in the middle of the ocean. Even for them, who pilot the only aircraft authorized to carry out night rescuesthis situation went beyond the things they had faced at that time.
That’s what they told José as soon as they climbed the rope that morning. “My son and I were hugging each other to get rid of the cold. Wet to the skin and our hands were covered in mud. Our cell phones had been carried away by the current, like the rest of our belongings,” José tells EL ESPAÑOL .
VIDEO | This involved the rescue of a co-pilot from the CC Bonaire Maritime Rescue: this was necessary so that the helicopter could operate during the first evacuations due to damage.
Two weeks have passed since that fateful night in which they lost everything they owned, but they managed to save their lives. His house remains destroyed. Tree trunks and reeds dragged by the river remain on the shattered walls of this house. José says no one is here to help them yet..
“I was just cleaning and looking for one of my rifles, which I managed to get out of a room. I’ve been removing mud for two weeks, I even have mud in my eyes. The four memories we had are lying around there,” he explains. This is his life now, day by day. Also that of their neighbors.
José and his son, whose name resembles him, have many reasons to celebrate after surviving the most hellish night of their lives, the worst in the history of the Valencian Community. The people on the other side of the flood Manis They saw that he, his son and two other people who were hanging on to the roof were going to die. They were local police officers, firefighters… No one dared to try to rescue them. “They told my wife that until dawn “We couldn’t send a helicopter.” From the roof, on the verge of collapsing, they kept screaming. Then someone called Maritime Rescue, the only one with enough experience for a maneuver of this nature.
José says he owes a perpetual debt to this maritime rescue patrol. His helicopter, the Helimer 203was the only one who went out to steal the night of the flood. Their help was crucial in saving 11 people during three different operations. However, this rescue team also suffered countless setbacks that night. They had to overcome all kinds of obstacles to be able to go to work, putting their lives in danger and saving the lives of many people. José says he wants to tell the story of the team that saved him because they deserve to be remembered for their courage. “They gave him some eggs and I will thank them for the rest of my life.”
The rescue of the companion
Each time a Maritime Rescue aircraft departs, a pilot, a co-pilot, a crane operator and at least one rescuer must be on board. That night, in Manises’ hangar, Raúl, Julio and Javier missed Rodrigo, their fourth colleague, so they could go to work. “No one told them there was an alert of this nature,” says José, remembering what they told him the day after his rescue.
With a beard, José and his son, with their neighbors Paco and Mari, recently rescued by Salvamento Marítimo.
This is why, The helicopter pilot quietly went to the cinema before going to work. Rodrigo went to the Bonaire mall, an enclave that has attracted enormous attention in recent days because of the possibility of a large number of deaths in its parking lot.
Fortunately, no one died on Bonaire. But once the session was over, Rodrigo couldn’t get out of there.
Meanwhile, in the Manises hangar, everything was practically flooded when the colleagues of this team arrived for work. Those who rescued him told José that there was so much water that they were taken to the shed in a fire truck. One of them lost his car by leaving it in the parking lot. It was 10:30 p.m.
Those hours were a nightmare for everyone. A kind of biblical plague has submerged the metropolitan area of the province of Valencia in water and mud. The crane operator, third member of the rescue team, was only able to arrive at the hangar at midnight. The firefighters took the air traffic controllers in their truck to the Manises control tower. Everything was complicated.
From dawn, countless 112 alerts arrived on the maritime rescue patrol’s telephone. They had to leave, They were the only ones who could do it, and there were people who were seriously at risk of dying from DANA. Two of these people were José and his son, whom they would rescue a few hours later.
However, they could not fly without their co-pilot. With the chaos of the previous hours, they did not realize that the missing colleague had sent a video at eight in the afternoon, warning that he was in Bonaire and could not leave. Two companions volunteered to go and rescue him in the middle of the flood.
The survivors, accompanied by the maritime rescue patrol.
From the helicopter zone to the Bonaire shopping center, it is an 11-minute drive. More than an hour of walking if everything is not flooded. It took about two hours to arrive. By the time they entered the mall, the pilot had already received notice that they were going to pick him up. At three in the morning, the four members of the team took off from the Manises hangar to save those who were clinging as a last resort to the roofs of their houses.
Rescue impossible
In the middle of a storm, rescuing José, his son and his neighbors Paco and Mari was a practically impossible operation. Despite this, the plane managed to approach the ground, even at the risk of hitting the high-voltage cables toppled and scattered by the storm.
The Turia River passes very close to the house where José lived before the current swept him away. That morning, he and his family knew there was a torrential rain warning, but they had no idea the disaster could reach this scale.
It didn’t rain in the afternoon. “We knew a DANA was coming, and as the Turia river passes near our house, I took the animals, the dogs, the horse, and we took them to a piece of land that we have near our house. Something we only do once every 40 years. You never imagine something like this will happen.
The flooding occurred within minutes. At eight thirty, it was not raining and the water in the river was falling at a normal rate in this area of Manis. Seeing this situation, José went down with the car to buy gasoline, in case the next day, being incommunicado, he would need it. “I went down calmly. But by nine o’clock in the evening, things had already changed. The river swept almost all of us away. We almost ended up on the beach. It didn’t take my wife a minute to go and get the car to go out.
The water came suddenly and José found himself locked in his house. He was only able to get out when the water almost completely covered him and the force of the current bent one of the house’s doors enough for him to escape. He went up to the roof with his son. He was separated by the flood about 150 meters from his wife, who managed to escape to the other side of the distorted river bed. The father and son shouted to him that they were alive.
This is how José’s neighbor endured that night on the roof of the house while Salvamento Marítimo saved her.
The flow increased so much that after several hours on the roof, they had no choice but to take the risk and jump into the water to reach new cover in which to take refuge. “I told my son: jump, the water will wash away the house. We both jumped into the river against the flow, and we managed to reach the neighbor’s house.” It’s the one with solar panels.
There, they resisted for hours with Paco, the neighbor, and Mari, his wife. From this height, they saw how another neighbor had been swallowed up by the current. On the other side of the river, several acquaintances from the town, including José’s wife, were calling on the phone to ask for someone to come and rescue them.
“At first everyone said they couldn’t catch us, that the water would wash away the houses, that they were going to kill all four of us.”. Then the helicopter appeared in the sky.” The rescue was an operation to the end, as shown in the videos that José’s family provided to EL ESPAÑOL.
This is what José’s house looked like after the flood.
A builder and previously a worker in Aguas de Valencia, José, now retired, lost everything, but that night he clung to the roof of his neighbors’ house, becoming, along with his 37-year-old son, years old, one of the survivors of the disaster which has already left more than 220 dead. “Everything I had, 40 years of contributions, my whole life was packed into this house. All that remains are the logs and reeds brought by the current.”
Already by helicopter, they went to the airport. “They gave us clean clothes, slippers, underwear, showers, muffins, coffee with milk. They acted like we were their family. There were lots of hugs and kisses and I love you,” José remembers. We can never thank these four members of the sea rescue team enough for their courage.
He says they continue to talk these days with the guys from the patrol who saved them. They were told they were in a small field where at least they slept under a warm roof and with a pillow. They have no food, so they have to go and ask for it from those who distribute food to the victims. They now have the necessary documents to seek help for this tragedy. After two weeks of clearing mud and rubble, it turns out to be an irritating bureaucratic maze for those, like José and his family, who are asked to prove what they had and what they lost . “We are alive, yes, but everything has gone into the river. We have nothing left.”
