Just a week before the passage of DANA through the Huelva capital community It once again suffered flooding in the areas near marshes due to the strong high tide. With the storm, the red alert was activated in the province of Huelva on several occasions. “Huelva was saved from a major catastrophe because there was no high tide”said sources from the security coordination operation in the Junta. Chance, providence, destiny or simply the tides aligned with Huelva. It also happens that last October was the driest in Andalusia since 2015 and, specifically, also in the province of Huelva, which It was the only one in the community in which not a drop fell. With DANA everything fell together. The low tide “prevented anything even close to what happened in Valencia” from happening. indicated the same sources from the highest security directorate in the region. The province of Huelva has recovered 35 hm3 in its reservoirs in a single week, an increase of 2.33%. It has been years since the Chanza River as it passes through Aroche has been seen as it is today. In the capital, the rain collected by Storm Bernard was overcome.
On Tuesday, October 29, there was high water at 1:28 and 1:41 p.m.; on Wednesday the 30th at 1:59 and at 2:12 p.m. On Thursday the 31st, at 2:28 and 2:43 p.m.; and on Friday, November 1, at 2:56 and 3:12 p.m., according to data from the Port of Huelva. The red warning of extreme risk due to torrential rains from the Aemet extended until 12:00 on the Huelva coast. The storm had been hanging over Huelva since the last hour of the previous Thursday. On Friday the first floods arrived, landslides on roads and flooding of garages. At 5:00, Aemet activated the red notice. The inhabitants of the Andévalo, Condado and Litoral regions spent the early morning with bated breath after what happened in the Valencian Community. The strong storm and the way the water fell, torrentially, woke up many of the neighbors, who got up from their beds to capture images of the lightning illuminating the sky and the flooded streets. The president of the Junta de Andalucía himself, Juanma Moreno, asked through his networks to “extreme caution” and, above all, avoid unnecessary travel. The red alert ended at three in the afternoon, with records of up to 117 liters per square meter that fell in just three hours in the municipality of Cartaya. Precipitation of similar intensity was also recorded in El Aljaraque, Gibraleón and Punta Umbría. In Aljaraque, in fact, the firefighters carried out one of the most spectacular maneuvers, rescuing a woman at dawn who took refuge on the roof of her home when she saw how the water level was rising. One of the most worrying consequences of passage of the DANA through Huelva was the flooding of the Oraque river, a tributary of the Odiel, after the storm of heavy rainfall reached its “historic maximum level” triggering a dangerous situation, according to the Minister of the Presidency and Interior, Antonio Sanz.
The head of the Presidency explained that the warning was not activated in Huelva, as it was in Cádiz first and in Almería later due to the circumstances of people on the street and the risk: «It is not the same that the alert occurs when there are many people on the street than when there are fewer people, It is not the same as in river beds (like Huelva), a high tide than at low tide, it is not the same as when the population is a certain number of kilometers away from when (like Jerez) the houses are on the same bank. , it is not the same (Almería) that you receive a red alert or that you receive a double alert in which the cumulative twelve-hour Aemet alert is combined with a massive risk of torrential rain in one hour… if you combine the accumulated with the risk torrential, you get a more extreme risk. «If there had been high tide at that time, the Odiel river, which was the largest channel in all of Andalusia,a blockage would have occurred between the water outlet and that high tide, that was the risk for Jerez, when it is at low tide (like Huelva) the circumstances were different,” explained the Presidency advisor. According to the latest studies by the Ministry of Ecological Transition, of the fifteen enclaves with the highest risk of flooding in Spain, four are located in Andalusia and one of them is Isla Cristina-Ayamonte, in Huelva.