The Valencian 112 received an abnormal volume of calls already on the morning of October 29 | Spain

Veteran workers from the Valencian emergency service 112 claim that they faced abnormal waiting times on the morning of Tuesday, October 29, due to the high number of calls due to the flood. Operators are trained to consider it a wait, but the calls for help began to skyrocket beyond the usual around 9 a.m. and increased progressively hour by hour, according to two employees on the morning shift that day, who They have requested anonymity to speak with EL PAÍS for fear of reprisals. Both, veterans of the service, say they have never seen so many sustained requests for help. Neither in previous cold drops nor during the covid pandemic nor in episodes like . “We barely had time to process what was happening, but I remember raising my head to look at the videowall (giant screen) from the back of the room and I saw that the times did not stop increasing. From 14 seconds to 25, from 25 to 70…”, says an operator. A third worker, who came in in the afternoon, says that she found a “crazy” situation at the switchboard.

The person in charge of the room, Manuel Villalba, ordered early on the workers from other departments in the building (training, quality and protocol) to also start serving the citizens, and called employees who had the day off to attend. They will be incorporated urgently, according to the operators who worked the morning shift, from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. They add that Villalba himself, who usually works from his office, pitched in and collaborated with the rest. Exceeding 10 seconds of pick-up time is something extraordinary. It happens at critical moments or when there is a lack of personnel. But that morning the delay was very high for a long time, according to the employees. Furthermore, the service was well staffed. , indicates that, on a monthly average, that limit was never exceeded.

This thermometer of what was happening, a source of information from the Valencian Government of Carlos Mazón, useful for managing the crisis – the warnings from the State Meteorological Agency or the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation and the calls from the delegate of the central Government -. The 112 service depends on a technician, the deputy director general of Community Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, who sits in the emergency coordination center of the Generalitat (Cecopi). The 112 building is located in the same complex where Cecopi meets, in the municipality of L’Eliana, on the outskirts of the city of Valencia. Despite this, the Minister of the Interior, Salomé Pradas, summoned the emergency body, Cecopi, and the ES-Alert alert to citizens’ cell phones.

The Valencian Ministry of Justice and Interior has revealed that between 7:00 p.m. on Tuesday and 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday, a total of 13,900 calls were received at the 112 switchboard, according to one, without specifying data for the previous hours. EL PAÍS has requested to know the volume of calls that the Valencian 112 received throughout the day on Tuesday, hour by hour, but at the time of publication of this article it had not received a response.

That day, the workers already knew from the beginning of the shift that they would face a hard day, something they are accustomed to every time the cold weather hits the region in the months of September and October. The service, in fact, is sized according to needs and that morning there were around twenty operators in the room. The day before, the Valencian 112 X social network account had already warned that a complicated situation was coming. “Avoid taking the car if it is not necessary,” said a message from Monday, October 28.

From very early on Tuesday, that X account launched more warning tweets. At 8:49 to avoid the car if it was not necessary; at 10.22 cars with water over the wheels in the Vall d’Alcalans; and at 4:57 p.m. in which a car is seen swept away by a torrent in Utiel-Requena.

At dawn, the 112 operators were already answering calls from inland municipalities such as Carlet or Alberich where the wind and rain were causing havoc, such as falling ceilings in industrial warehouses, according to the morning workers (a shift that goes from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.). Around 9:00 a.m., calls began to arrive from Utiel and Requena, towns in the mountainous interior due to the torrential rains. According to these employees, already in the morning shift it was clear that something extraordinary was happening. During that shift, calls had already come in from homes where water had flooded entire floors.

The volume of calls continued to grow to the point that for a time calls from citizens were not coming through. Due to this collapse, up to 338 calls located in Valencia were diverted to 112 of the Community of Madrid, as explained days later in a press conference by Carlos Novillo, the Madrid Minister of the Interior. The Madrid operators collected the data and geolocation to later transfer it to those responsible for the Valencia 112 Center through the direct telephone numbers they have between the devices, according to Novillo.

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