It was a busy time at the Mercadona supermarket in Paiporta, a town of 25,000 residents south of Valencia. On Tuesday, October 29, floodwaters from the hills, following torrential rains, swept through the town and into the store’s parking lot. How many shoppers were trapped in the hundreds of square meters of the underground parking lot? How many tried to retrieve their cars? How many managed to escape in time? No one knows, but it’s clear that the water rose to almost two meters high across the entire town.
For three days, priorities were elsewhere, and if there had been any hope of finding survivors, it wouldn’t be here under this huge body of water. Clearing the path was also necessary, untangling the web of cars by removing them one by one so firefighters could reach the site with heavy equipment.
Eventually, on Saturday morning, more than three days after the torrential rains, the pumps began to evacuate the water – thousands of cubic meters of muddy water. “It’s very slow because it’s so large,” explained Raoul Plou Martinez, a firefighter from the north of Spain, who came to help his colleagues in the Valencia region, overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis. Two pumps had been operating since 8 am, and the water level had only dropped by one meter. “It will take days. We fear the worst,” added a soldier from the Unidad Militar de Emergencias (UME), an army unit specializing in rescue operations. Only then will firefighters be able to search the parking lot and check inside the vehicles.
Divers probing mud
How many people are still missing from Mercadona? How many bodies are lying in the city’s many underground parking lots? And in Alfafar, Benetusser or Picanya? In the whole region? Four days after the deadly floods, which left a provisional death toll of 211 in the Valencia region and three more in the rest of the country, everyone is asking these questions.
The authorities are showing a certain restraint in their transparency, no doubt to avoid aggravating the fear and anger, but this risks fueling the rumors. On Thursday, Minister for Territorial Policy Angel Victor Torres spoke of “dozens and dozens of people missing,” while the death toll stood at 155. According to the Spanish media, thousands of people were initially reported missing in the hours following the crisis, highlighting the chaos that reigned in the affected towns. When communications networks were eventually restored, many of these people were able to contact their families, the authorities or return home, considerably reducing the number of missing.
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