The Dana Judge collects transcripts of calls from Dana victims to the state’s public telecare service. The judge in the case included a new transcript, prepared by the prosecutor to administer justice, that corresponded to the calls of a Cattaruga man with limited mobility. In the first call, the service operator calls the man who warns him: “I have half a meter of water at home.” The operator tells him to “try to get high” and announces that she will call his children. The man says his children may not be able to get there by car, and the operator says: “They don’t answer the phone at emergency services, they’re full.”
The second transcribed voice indicates the remote care worker’s desperation when she loses contact with the man with limited mobility:
-Is your cell phone in your hand? Your daughter’s going there, okay? To try to get him out of there. I want you to have your cell phone in your hand at all times, do you hear me? …Louis, please answer me…. Hello Louis?
This is the last time the service was able to contact the user. The next calls are to the sons of the man who lived in a three-story house. The daughter tells her that they are trying to contact their aunt, who lives on the same street. However, the man with difficulty moving no longer has a connection: “The plugs are wet and the phone no longer works.”
The daughter tried to reach her father’s house by car, although she did not know how far she could go. The following texts are from attempts to contact emergency services. The text read: “Unfortunately, the system is unable to process your service request at this time, please.”
112 does not answer the call
The next audio clip reads as follows: “I have called 112 Comunidad Valencena, and we are experiencing a period of rain and storms. If you have an emergency, hold on. Otherwise, leave the line free.”
In the seventh recording, the operator calls the man’s son who has difficulty moving, who is stuck on the road trying to get to the family home in Cattarooga to help his father:
—We can’t reach because there’s already water… I don’t know if we’ll be covered in water either.
– My mom…
– We can’t. My father suffers from lack of movement, and…
– Yes, I know, Celia told me. It’s just that, do you know what happens? This number 112 does not… 112 does not pick up the phone. Tell me.
-And firefighters? Now… he no longer picks up the phone because it looks like water has gotten into the ports and it no longer works. So, just in case the firefighters…do they know? The thing is…
(…)
-No… No, I’m completely separated from him, I don’t know if… If… I don’t know, nothing anymore, I can’t talk to him on the phone… We can’t get there.
-Oh, is he home alone?
– Of course he is alone at home. He is alone. So… the last time I was able to talk to him, he said the water was up to his knees, but…
– Oh mother of my life.
-And you told your partner, and she already knows, that he’s lonely.
-Oh, no, but I didn’t know these details. But she knows. It does, don’t worry.
—Okay, okay, thank you. It’s just that he can’t walk either.
– Oh mom. This sounds like the end of the world, huh.
-Yes, it’s crazy.
– All Valencia is the same.
– We have reached the roundabout, wow! If the water was actually getting to us, we would have been able to turn around, the water is rising by the minute, I don’t know… If my dad was clinging to the walls, poor guy, well… but he’s 66% disabled.
-Oh, what a pity, look, oh, look, look, look, look, look. Oh, hush, hush, hush, for God’s sake.
-I don’t know if he’ll be able to, I don’t know…it’s just…
-Yes, woman. Maybe, now I’ll tell Celia again, okay?
-Okay, okay, I appreciate that.
-Come on, nothing, yet.
– Come on, thank you, so far.
“I’m at the top of the tower and I can’t move forward.”
Then there was another failed attempt by the telecare worker to call 112. She then called the daughter of the man with limited mobility trapped in his Cattaroga home again to ask if emergency services had arrived.
The daughter answers: “It’s just… Let’s see, I’m in Valencia, we can’t get through. (…) I don’t know if he has arrived. My father is alone, I can’t reach him. We tried, but here it’s already closed everywhere. The cars are flooded, damaged… I’m at the height of the tower, and I can’t go further.”
The woman expressed her regret that 112, firefighters, and local police did not respond. “And the level doesn’t stop rising, my husband tells me that we… The problem is that if there’s already water inside the house, because the mobility is so low, he won’t be able to move forward or walk, is that…”
“At 112, they collapsed and didn’t even pick it up.”
The telecare worker kept trying to call 911. On the next call, the daughter was still completely desperate and very stressed. “We don’t know anything,” he said. “We try to call 112, and it says, ‘Oh, 112,’ and it says, ‘This number doesn’t exist.’ They’re exhausted and they don’t even answer it.”
– Please, because he is alone, and this is what I told you, he has difficulty moving. So…
-He understands.
—We have no way of contacting him, and I don’t know… It’s just that we didn’t… We reached the tower, but the water level was rising more and more and we were already in danger.
-Be careful too.
-actually…
—You’ve been notified of 112, now I’m demanding notification, okay?
-actually.
-Thank you.
– Well, thank you very much, so far.
-yet.
“It’s terrible”
After another failed attempt to call 112, the daughter told a second operator, after 9:30 p.m., that she was trying to call her father’s neighbors to inform them of the situation in her father’s home area.
—We’re stuck in… well, far away, in the tower where all the cars are, well… floating around us. It was… well… it was terrible, really. And the thing is, I’m calling… No, no, no, it’s all cut off, isn’t it? To find out what…
– Yes, yes, right. No, no, the thing is that the Silla Trail is inaccessible, because at the peak of Masanasa because of IKEA and everything, the valley flooded.
– It’s overflowing. The full chair track, well, well.
– Yes, everything, that is, the entire path of the chair is overflowing. The A3, which is everything that goes through Torrent, etc., also overflows. True, they are all cut off
-Okay.
-If it’s not because of the flood, it’s because of a truck crash, or because…
-They dropped the trucks and everything.
– Yes, yes.
– Well, nothing. I imagine that my father, even though he had to walk up the stairs and he’s sitting on the stairs with his butt sticking out, he probably would have been able to get up, you know? I don’t know. Let’s wait and see that everything goes well. We are very worried.
—Let’s see, I understand, I understand…Everyone is the same, but it’s not like that…It’s just that at seven o’clock in the afternoon there was already access to the houses that the firefighters told us they could not reach.
– They couldn’t reach.
-We’re talking about 7 p.m.
– Yes, okay.
– In some places, especially along the Ribeira River. Here in La Horta Sud, the whole disaster started around seven-thirty, eight, eight, but the thing is that the flooding has been continuing in the Ribeira since this morning.
– Since this morning. Well, well, nothing. Thank you for the information.
-nothing. If we know anything, we will contact you.
-Okay, okay, I’m waiting, thank you very much.
-Okay, good night.
There are no more written audios.
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