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For dozens of Valencians, the car became a death trap during last week’s floods. Either because they sought refuge and safety in them, or because they thought about using them to escape more quickly or because they simply wanted to save their car. Result: they ended up trapped in their own garages and making access difficult.
Spanish emergency teams continue to carry out searches with divers in underground parking lots and private garages in Valencia, and the authorities do not rule out that bodies will continue to be located while hitherto inaccessible places are inspected.
“Inside the car there is a false sense of security, because we think it is heavy. But as soon as the water passes over the axle of the wheel, it is already unstable and, although we fear water less than fire, for example, moving water is very dangerous because it has a lot of force and puts a lot of force into it. pressure in the car wheel,” explains Annika Coll, head of Ericam, the Emergency and Immediate Response team of the Community of Madrid, to the newspaper El País.
“The cars, in these cases, They are a trap and make access difficult. That is why it is so important to have a preventive culture, that citizens know what they should not do and what they can do until the rescue teams arrive,” Virginia Barcones, general director of Civil Protection and Emergencies, told the same newspaper. .
Annika Coll also has no doubt that if more people had avoided access to cars on the worst day of the storm in Valencia, last Tuesday, October 29, the number of fatalities from the natural disaster, exceeding 210, could have been minor. For the firefighter, with more than 25 years of experience in international earthquake and flood scenarios, “prior education”about what to do or not do in an emergency is a determining factor in the final casualty count.
The warnings to avoid “any type of movement in the province of Valencia” were transmitted via SMS to residents shortly after 8:00 p.m. last Tuesday night. According to Maribel Albalat, mayor of Paiporta, where 60 people died, “the first warnings came late, when the water was two meters high and the damage had already been done.” Many Valencians believed they had time and ran to their cars instead of seeking shelter in high places where the water couldn’t reach.
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, revealed this Saturday that “more than 2,000 vehicles” have been removed from the roads and that the inspection of garages, roadshouses and riverbeds resulted in the removal of 211 bodies.
While the search for dozens of missing people is one of the main priorities of the authorities in Valencia, operations are being carried out in flooded garages of large shopping centers. Divers from the Civil Guard and the Military Emergency Unit (UME) told El Español that they found “corpses by touch” in private and public garages that are still full of wastewater in the city of Sedaví, just 12 kilometers from Valencia.
A huge device is installed in the Bonaire Shopping Center, in Aldaia, where, after a first inspection of the underground parking lot that was submerged, the rescue teams have not found any body so far. The information was made public this Monday, but according to the Spanish National Police, cited by ABC, it is not yet known. was not ruled out There are fatalities at the scene. 50 cars were inspected after removing the water that accumulated in the infrastructure. The facility has a total of 1,800 seats on a total of 60,000 square meters.
If at first the cars are a “mousetrap”, in a second moment they are a blockade: they prevent rescue or help from arriving, while they pile up at the entrances to the streets, creating real barriers.
“Our teams were on pre-alert throughout the Mediterranean basin due to torrential rains and, as soon as we began to see the severity, around six in the afternoon on Tuesday, we tried to get more equipment out, but the closure of the roads and the floods made it very difficult. mobility,” Íñigo Vila, Red Cross emergency director, explains to El País.
“At this point there is little that can be done. And although there is the possibility of finding people alive inside the vehicles, it is not possible to enter and clean the roads with heavy machinery. The arrival of aid had a series of very complex conditions. “It was a perfect storm.” Íñigo Vila regrets that he was in catastrophic scenarios, such as the great floods of Badajoz, 11-M, Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti and the tsunami in Indonesia.
Source: Observadora