Although the plight of the flood victims in Paiporta (Valencia) have long since left the front pages of newspapers, the situation is still very far from 'normal.'

Many block residents are still waiting for their basement car parks to be emptied of water and toxic mud (it’s toxic because it has sewage mixed in with it) but one of the biggest headaches are the ruined cars that still have to be dealt with; hence the title of this article.

There are actually 128.000 vehicles dumped on 20 pieces of publicly owned land. So far the Generalitat has towed away 30,000 vehicles to the scrap yards, which only represent 23% of those wiped out by the flood waters.

What is slowing it down is the bureaucratic process, as each vehicle owner has to be traced and the damage ascertained by the insurance company, in other words, all the normal bureaucratic process of scrapping a car has to be followed.

Councillor Martínez Mus pointed out that it is not only a case of cars written off and accumulating on huge fields, but all the other kinds of debris; 500,000 tonnes of it, to be exact.

Slowly, the vehicles on the publicly owned plot of land, Picassent, are being sent to the mangling/compressing machinery owned by the José Jareño S.A company in Sagunto. When the last vehicle has been towed away for destruction, then the land on which they sat will have to be decontaminated; i.e., the oil, fuel and other liquids that have leaked out of the vehicles whist they were piled on top of each other since the flood waters hit two months ago.

(News: Paiporta, Valencia)

Keywords: Abandoned Vehicles, Flood Damage, Scrapping Procedure, Drawn Out, Bureaucratic Nightmare

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