The brothers Carmen and Antonio Molina assumed their death the day the Los Pinos urbanization, on Lugo 4 street, in Godelleta, an agricultural locality located about 30 kilometers from Valencia, was devastated by the floods caused by DANA on October 29. “We came this far,” Antonio, 53, told his neighbor Vicente Cabrera, 70, at one point during more than three and a half hours as they clung to two columns of a chalet while that the torrent of water surrounded them. above their waist. “Once we accept it, calm returns. I was alone and I said goodbye to everyone,” Carmen said with a trembling voice, showing a notebook in which she wrote down what happened on the day of her death and rebirth.
The walls of the ground floor of Carmen’s semi-detached house are marked by the brown water which rushed in until it reached a height of more than two meters. Carmen was in the kitchen around 5:00 p.m. when she saw that the flood was inundating her house and that the closed windows were in danger of breaking. And they did. “Quickly, I went up to the second floor. Within seconds, the couch in my house was floating and water was rising up the stairs.
As she had virtually no cover during those fateful hours, this 55-year-old teacher knocked on the wall she shares with the home of her father Antonio, about to turn 80, to see if he was okay . Fortunately, he was: he stayed on the second floor all afternoon. Knowing nothing about his brother, he took a flashlight to signal to his chalet, located across the street, and got a response, that of his nephew. He heard from his brother around 9 p.m., when the raft had already gone down and from the balcony he shouted to him:
– “Is that you, Antonio?”
– “Yes, it’s me.”
A few days after the flood and with the incessant cleaning work, the Molina family is clear: “We are leaving, the floods are getting stupider and stupider. » Moreover, “of the 12 houses that we own in this neighborhood, I think that practically all of us are gone,” explains Antonio.
Over the last seven years, this small urbanization located near the Juncar ravine and very close to a stream through which water flows so that the local CV-424 road that connects to Buñol is not flooded, has suffered the consequences material damage from three attacks of the water which descended through these two canals overflowed in torrential rains. In 2018, “water entered the width of a hand”; in the second, in 2020, “there was one and a half meters outside the house and inside, half a meter”; and “the latter was almost fatal”.
Antonio Molina and his son Toni embrace as they remember the afternoon and night of floods that devastated their home. Antonio spent more than 3 hours clinging to an exterior column to try to resist the force of the water. | Saint Donaire
“We cannot live with the fear of rain and risk dying,” admits Antonio, who cries with helplessness and rage, while hugging his eldest son Toni, 32, with whom he works as a carpenter. . “If this becomes more and more frequent, are we going to stay there until we are wiped out? »
Cottages built on floodplains
According to municipal sources, of the more than 4,000 people registered in the municipality of Godelleta, nearly 2,000 reside outside the urban center, in chalets located in urbanizations and scattered – houses grouped together in a place that is not considered as a population center.
The urbanization in which the Molina family lived until now is 6 kilometers from the city, where it has barely suffered damage caused by DANA, while this area, in which other urbanizations are located and scattered to through the ravines of Murtal and Gallego which flow for kilometers on the Rambla del Poyo, is the ground zero of the Godelleta catastrophe.
“When they gave us the keys in March 2005, we didn’t know there were ravines here. Over time, people told me that years ago this area flooded. I buy from a developer who has authorization from the Town Hall to build houses to live in, because I trust them,” explains Carmen. “But of course, in the middle of the housing bubble… I’ll leave it at that, okay?”
On January 28, 2003, the date on which the Generalitat approved the Territorial Action Plan for Flood Risk Prevention in the Valencian Community (PATRICOVA), it was confirmed that in Godelleta there were no “zones affected by the risk of flooding in the municipality. , that is, in the case of floods it was not considered that they could cause damage to people, property and human activities. During the last revision of PATRICOVA, approved in October 2015, areas of risk of geomorphological danger were indicated in the municipal area, that is to say the probability of flooding in certain forms (valleys, ravines, disappearance of canals, etc.) and the document once again confirms that there is no risk of flooding.
In the case of the Los Pinos urbanization, according to PATRICOVA, it is only marked as a geomorphological danger zone and not as a flood risk, despite the fact that the houses have suffered material damage due to three floods since 2018 and that several neighbors feared losing. their lives on October 29.
According to one of the purchase and sale documents for Carmen Molina’s house signed in November 2004 with the real estate agency Avance Inmobiliario del Este SL., it is specified how the building permit was granted during a commission of the Godelleta town hall held on March 11. 2003, about a month after PATRICOVA was approved.
The Godelleta Town Hall alleges that “the permits granted in the said area” were allocated on the basis of the General Urban Plan of 1988, prior to PATRICOVA and still in force – with modifications until 2018 -, and that since 2007 “they do not have permits granted to build new buildings like Los Pinos or Alameda [área con un restaurante y chalets aledaño, que también sufrió graves destrozos hace dos semanas] in these areas.
Lack of information and late solutions
In January 2022, a neighbor of the Molina family, Marina Gandía Vergara, and her partner purchased a villa in Los Pinos through the real estate agency Vostra Casa for 165,000 euros. “I’m from Alaquas and my boyfriend is from Xirivella, small towns 20 minutes drive from here. We liked the neighborhood, which was a closed community of neighbors and gave us security,” he says over the phone.
“It was during the first neighborhood meeting that we learned about the flooding,” he remembers. The insurance consortium had compensated the community to repair damaged walls and septic tank after the 2020 flood. “This information was hidden from us by the real estate agency because, if we had known, we would not have entered this house. “, he assures. In this regard, Vostra Casa responds by email saying that they have not been “developers or builders of these houses” and refers this newspaper to speak with the town hall to see if it can provide more information.
The young couple – both aged 30 – presented a letter to the town hall to confirm that Residencial Los Pinos was a flood zone and that it had suffered damage. They point out that the answer they got was that the urbanization had suffered the floods of 2018 and 2020. After the floods two weeks ago, they put the file in the hands of their lawyers. “We can’t live here and we have many years left on our mortgage. »
During a meeting held on November 6 between representatives of this neighborhood community and the Godelleta City Hall, they were informed of the public assistance they could request for the damage caused to their homes. Two days before, a resident of this community, representing the 12 housing units, had presented a request to the municipal council to transmit the request that the urbanization be recognized as an uninhabitable area and that they be compensated for the full value of the property.
“If they leave from there, they cannot be sold, they are currently near the bed of the Juncar ravine,” says the mayor of Godelleta, María Amparo Pardo Luján. “In 2020 [en aquel momento era concejala de urbanismo] It was proposed to make a detour so that this urbanization would no longer be the channel of this ravine. If we diverted it a little sooner, it would stop going that way. It’s a very expensive project and it’s been on the table ever since, but they have to do it from the ministry. because they are the ones who have the economic resources.
Sources from the Department of Agriculture of the Generalitat affirm that the competences of this project belong to the City Hall, which in turn must have the approval of the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar (CHJ), and that there is collaboration of the General Directorate of Water. . “Currently, the channeling of this ravine is being studied,” they emphasize, “even if after DANA, the priority will be to prevent these areas from being flooded again.”
Although the responsibility lies with the public administration, the tenants of Los Pinos prepare the documentation and carry out all the processes to get compensation to help them start from scratch in another place, far from the ravines and flood zones. They resettled as best they could with their relatives and friends, as did thousands of people affected by DANA in other cities of Valencia, and only two families slept on the second floor of the house for these two weeks because they have a lot of animals.
Carmen Molina managed to rent an apartment in Cheste, after sleeping in four different houses. His brother Antonio is at his sister-in-law’s house. His father went to live in a two-room apartment with another of his brothers in Quart de Poblet, a town where he lived part of his life with his children and which they left in 2005 in search of “more tranquility.”
“They say that because of what happened to us, we are climate refugees, Carmen,” Antonio says goodbye, as he keeps moving from one place to another to help repair his house and those of its neighbors.
