Barcelona“When I got up on Tuesday morning, it was already raining heavily.” It could be the testimony of many residents of the center of the Valencian Country affected by the DANA, but it is the testimony of the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón. It was seven in the morning. “I had to make a decision before classes started,” he recalls. The buses were already having problems running. At the time, he says the alert from the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) was orange. The decision was to suspend classes and all public activity. In a tweet at 9:22 am they also recommend avoiding travel. Utiel is a small town, with a little over 11,000 inhabitants, and some citizens who know the mayor also received a message from him recommending that they stay home. “During the morning the alert turned red, but we had already made the decisions,” says the mayor. At noon the river overflowed and flooded the streets.
Each municipality experienced the hours before the great wave of DANA in a particular way. Some acted earlier, others were overtaken at the same time. Not everyone had the same information, but all emphasize that no information warned of the true extent of the floods. “No one had told us that there would be floods,” says Joan Ramon Adsuara, the mayor of Alfafar, near Valencia. There overflowed all the water that had fallen a few hours earlier in Utiel. Adsuara knew there would be a “very strong” DANA. That morning he continued with his schedule, remembers that Aemet’s alerts were orange, and went to an event in Valencia. It was 9 o’clock in the morning. During that event, he received the first warnings from the municipal meteorologist and a private company that informs them of the weather situation. Adsuara emphasizes that the alerts were for “wind” and “rain”, but not for floods. Be that as it may, at mid-morning he returned to the town hall and they began to assess with the Local Police the suspension of the activities.
Around 1 p.m., they received a call from 112 alerting them that the warning was changing to red. A communication, however, that other mayors around say they did not receive. However, still in the morning he sent a message to the population announcing the suspension of classes and public activities. “Before 2:00 p.m., our warning was for everyone at home,” he says. Everyone at home, however, because of a storm that never came. Not a single drop fell in Alfafar and the towns of Horta Sud. “We imagined rain, not a tongue of mud and water,” says the mayor. There were people, therefore, who, seeing that it was not raining, went out into the street. In addition, many also tried to get their cars out when the streets began to fill with water.
“We didn’t imagine what would come,” admits Francisco Comes, mayor of Massanassa, bordering Alfafar. They too received the warning at midday that the alert was changing to red, but, again, it was for “strong winds”. None of the information they had, he says, indicated that the ravine would overflow in that way. The reaction was to suspend classes and public activity, and they said it both through social networks and through the various municipal loudspeakers (more used than ever lately) that there are in various parts of the town. They also advised people to stay at home. These decisions were made at noon and the flood that no one expected did not arrive until the evening. “It could have been much worse”, admits the mayor, and points out that six residents have lost their lives in his municipality.
Removing trees in the street
José Cabanes, mayor of Sadaví, also in L’Horta Sud, explains that in his town there was normal activity all day. He says that the only warning he saw was the orange one, which warned of strong wind and rain, but not of floods. “Not a single drop fell”, he emphasizes, and remembers that they did close the municipal parks. In fact, they were told by the private meteorology company that they have hired that they were not in danger because of the rains. So much so, that the mayor himself, just before the town began to flood, was not confined, but was with two municipal workers removing some trees that had fallen onto the public road due to the wind. “I had to run away,” he admits. He did so when the streets began to fill with water and he had to take refuge in a safe place. He explains that if he had known what was coming he would not have been on the street.
Also in Llocnou de la Corona, a small town of a hundred inhabitants next to Sedaví, they reacted when the water was about to arrive. Municipal sources claim that they stayed with the orange alert for rain and “it wasn’t raining”. When they began to know that the river had overflowed not far from there, they began to ask for the confinement of the neighbors for the town. Then everything went dark and the moments of chaos came. No one could communicate with anyone.
