A huge cemetery of water and mud would have wiped out the lives of an unspecified number of people who were trying to get their cars back from the shopping center's huge parking lot to escape the black wave of the tsunami that on Tuesday evening, in a few minutes, transformed Aldaya into an immense swamp .
"Welcome to Bonaire", read the signs in the parking lot of the shopping complex on the outskirts of Valencia, the largest in the city, where only four days after the catastrophe the military of the Army Emergency Unit (UME) managed to enter with the firefighters after having drained for 24 hours with the pumps the four cubic meters of water that had submerged the entire underground parking lot : it had a capacity of 1,800 parking spaces, 5,700 available in the entire shopping center.
It is not yet known how many people were trapped: the Ume divers had to wait for the mud to dry up to clear the way, but some of them have already spoken of "a cemetery down there". When the Dana hit the Spanish Levant on Tuesday evening, it was the evening rush hour, with families out shopping or eating in restaurants. The scene we see up close today is like the day after, with the mannequins in the windows reduced to ghostly black silhouettes of mud, shoes strewn in the mud along with pizza trays. Those who worked there estimate that at the time of the catastrophe there were about 650 people, apart from the employees of the shops and restaurants. The Ume technicians move reporters away from the entrance when they finally descend into the underground of horror. It could be the worst image of this never-ending tragedy.
Of the approximately 1,900 reports of missing persons that the Emergency Coordination Centre of the Generalitat Valenciana has received, 600 people had already been found by their loved ones by Thursday. But, apart from the rescue of a woman who survived after being trapped in her car under a pile of vehicles for more than three days, the death toll continues to be counted. As in Paiporta, where the number of victims has risen to 72, out of the 213 recovered so far.
"There are streets where it has not yet been possible to access because of the vehicles piled up in the sea of mud," explains José Antonio Redondo, Councilor for Labor and Commerce, who does not reveal the number of those who are "desaparecidos." A count that is coordinated by the Army's Military Unit and which he does not disclose. "There are dozens of those who are missing, at least here in Paiporta. I have a former workmate who has been missing since Thursday, after being last seen in a car. The vehicle has been found, but not his body," reports Juan Ramon Perez. "There are entire families who have disappeared and have not been heard from since Tuesday," he adds.
(Unioneonline/D)