The birthday that Pedro Nieto will never forget:

October 29th should have been another birthday in the life of Pedro Nieto, a lifelong resident of Catarroja (Valencia) who turned 42 that day. He had celebrated the previous Sunday with a meal at home with his family, but he wanted that Tuesday to be a quiet day so he could continue celebrating with his family. However, the DANA, which hit the entire community that afternoon and has already caused at least 224 deaths, was going to prevent him from doing so and was going to ensure that he always remembered this date.

Shortly after 3:00 p.m. on October 29, he received a call from a friend of his who lives in Chiva, another affected municipality. It was not precisely to congratulate him, since I wanted to inform you that the water in the Poyo ravine was beginning to leaksomething that quickly worried him seeing the history of floods that it had caused.

“At that moment I already saw that the situation was serious because I know that if the river goes out in that area in Catarroja there is two spans of water at minimum, so I called my mother, who lives on the ground floor, and told her that this was happening.that the Chiva ravine had come out, but he didn’t pay any attention to me,” says this plumber, who now lives with his family in Domeño, a municipality located 45 kilometers from Catarroja.

In fact, Mari Carmen, her mother, in the middle of the afternoon was going to go shopping at a supermarket a few blocks from Galicia Street where she lives when Her sister called her to go up to the upper floors of her house.where his other son lives, because the water was arriving. In the end he put on his pajamas and left the house with just enough.

“After 10 minutes there was already and that was like a tsunami. The whole street was filled with water and the doors of the houses could no longer be seen at ground level. Furthermore, it came with great force, the cars were piling up on top of each other, chairs, tables and everything were coming out of the houses. Even my husband thought about taking us higher because he was nowhere near reaching the first floor.“says this 67-year-old woman, who specifies that her home had a level of 2.20 meters high.

The next day when the sun rose and after spending the entire night without sleep, without light and being on the balcony seeing how their street had become a Venice thoroughfare, they became aware of the disaster.: “We saw it all and it was horrible. Telling it is one thing and living it is another. We are terrible, we have lost everything. I couldn’t upload either the bank book or the deed to the apartment, just some papers from a procedure we were doing and the bag with what was inside.”

The level of precipitation was such that the next day when Mari Carmen went to see her mother, who lives on the same street and is a dependent 95-year-old woman, He had to dress in his son’s underwear and pants because he had nothing left that could be used.

Pedro lived all those hours in distress at home, wondering whether or not to go to Catarroja. “My wife told me not to go and thank goodness I listened to her. because if it had gone the same, we wouldn’t be talking now,” he says.

He imagined that his parents had gone to his brother’s house, but since the communications had been lost he had not been able to confirm it. “From approximately 7 p.m. I could not speak to them again until the next day when I showed up there, I arrived at 1:30 p.m. and it took me almost seven hours to make a trip that normally takes 35 minutes,” Nieto recalls.

As he approached and traveled the few roads that had remained operational to reach I saw destroyed cars, overturned trucks and all the losses that DANA had caused. In his parents’ house, the kitchen had been completely unusable to the point that part of a partition had been removed.

“Now They are living in my grandmother’s house because we have to change the kitchen, dining room, put in new furniture and because there is also a lot of humidity and it is bad for the lungs,” says Pedro, who says that this weekend he will go with a dehumidifying machine to begin the work of habitability of the house.

“This has no reason to exist”

The anger of Pedro, Mari Carmen and the thousands of families from the towns who have lost everything and who have seen how their lives have changed forever is motivated, fundamentallydue to the fact that it was not warned and the management that was done.

“It makes me angry because it is not just the force of nature, against which you can do nothing, there is much more. At the time the alert came, there were already people trapped and in water up to their necks. This has no reason, it has been very strong,” Pedro complains.

He comments that in that area people know how to react to this type of problem because “it is something that has been happening all their lives and is not the first.” That’s why he complains that it took so long: ““They should have told people to climb two meters high and then no one would have died.”

the same with the opening of the gates of the Forata reservoirwhich requests that the authorities should have notified the population. “I understand that they have to open the floodgates because if the dam bursts it is a big problem and we would still go by canoe, but You have to notify everyone in all the towns in the area. You have to put valid people in positions with so much responsibility because if you know this from 8 in the morning you raise the alarm and if nothing happens later, nothing better,” he insists.

As the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation points out to the EFE Agency, the first notification regarding the opening of the reservoir It was sent to the civil protection authorities at 4:55 p.m.. This, however, did not reach the population.

“Why do they send us an alert to our cell phone later if we no longer needed it then, if I had a subway in my house! For example, in the 1987 flood we were able to save chairs, tables and more documentation because we took them to the upper floors ahead of time,” recalls Mari Carmen, who confesses that it has even crossed her mind to change municipalities so that they do not get caught again. “Who tells us that it won’t happen again next year or in five years?” he asks.

His son is much tougher: “Nothing has changed at the infrastructure level, nothing has been done. After the flood of ’57 they did channel the Turia riverbed, but then nothing more. There have continued to be floods and nothing has been done. “We have already had several of them taking out an inch of water at my parents’ house and the worst thing is that construction permits continue to be given in flood-prone areas.”

Furthermore, it also calls for an end to the “environmental adaptation and drainage of the Poyo basin” projectwhich had initially been approved in 2009 and had been paralyzed in 2021.

“There has been none like this”

To summarize the historical impact of this DANA, Mari Carmen quotes the words of Carmen, her mother, the next day after she saw from the window of her apartment how her street was filled with water: “He told me that he saw that the water was rising and rising and that it was worse than that of 1957 and that there had been none like this”.

Carmen was pregnant with her daughter when she saw how her town was flooded to the top. Then he lived on the first floor, but it was his parents who lived on the ground floor, so they had to rush up to his house. “They all came to my parents’ house and there were maybe 20 people”comments Mari Carmen now, who confesses to being calmer “after being crazy for two weeks.”

His family in those years among other things, they lost the bags of rice that they had harvested days beforesince they had them in bags stored on that ground floor where two meters of water had entered.

Regarding the 1987 flood, Mari Carmen once again remembers that they were able to safeguard some things. “It wasn’t as damaging as this either, approximately two inches of water entered us”indica.

Pedro has few memories, since he was five years old, but he does remember how his mother picked him up and took him upstairs. “That’s why I tell you that here we are used to because the water has come in more times and it has entered us an inch or less since I was born on five occasions,” he insists.

They both hope that Measures are taken, we learn from the misfortune that has happened and do not experience something similar again. because, forever, Pedro’s 42nd birthday will be linked to the most tragic DANA of the century.