Esther Tronchoni, 65, also a resident of Picassent, spent the night awake in her home. “It was unbelievable. I had never had a similar experience. It was raining a lot, it was very windy and it was very hot. Stones the size of eggs were falling. From inside the house you could hear noise, noise, noise, noise”
In the Municipality of Picassent (20,700 inhabitants), south of Valencia, “kilometer zero” of the disaster, the municipal council belatedly ordered the closing of schools. Outside the school in San Cristóbal, teacher Carolina Higueras, 30, received a call from her dealer: she had bought a car and he told her to pick it up in the afternoon. She took her old car and went to the outskirts of Valencia, together with her husband. “We weren’t even five minutes there when they told us we had to leave immediately: there was a lot of water coming in.” They left to return to Picassent, but the road had already collapsed. They continued walking down the secondary road until they saw no other option but to climb out of the windows.
“We climbed onto the roof of the car. We got out immediately or we would have been stuck. It was a desperate situation. For all those who were already on the main road it was impossible to return. Cars started piling up on top of each other. You could see mattresses floating outside the mall, helicopters flying overhead… I wrote my brother’s phone number on my arm, in case I needed to call someone.”
Together they went to the mall: it was flattened. It was just an open building, that of the Onyx company. The first floor had been flooded and the eleventh, with a kind of large room, had been transformed into an area to receive people affected by the tragedy. “They gave us food and drinks. There were about 70 of us. The worst thing was the smell and the feeling of helplessness. At three in the morning, when the storm had subsided a little, they decided to walk back, 12 kilometers in the middle of the night. “It took us three hours to reach, the road was full of water and mud. Everything destroyed”.
Esther Tronchoni, 65, also a resident of Picassent, spent the night awake in her home. “It was unbelievable. I had never had a similar experience. It was raining a lot, it was very windy and it was very hot. Stones the size of eggs were falling. From inside the house you could hear noise, noise, noise, noise”.
While she waited at home on the outskirts of Picassent, her husband, José Luis Moya, was stranded in the middle of the road, inside his vehicle about 14 kilometers away. He remained motionless, the car full of water. It was one of many. Some roads in Benetuser were filled with cars stuck in the mud. “A guy called me at eleven in the evening. He told me he was calling to tell me that José Luis was fine, that he couldn’t move, but that he was fine. I asked him to tell me the truth, I was afraid of something worse. But he insisted that he was fine”, says Estera.
At four in the morning he received another call. José Luis had managed to get a signal on his cell phone: “He was the one who explained to me that the boy had been on the balcony of his house, with his family, and that he was helping those affected, calling all the families of those who remained there in the middle of the road”. Last night Esther was still waiting for her husband at home. No electricity. (El PaÃs)
