The disaster caused by torrential rains, a consequence of the DANA or cold drop which crossed eastern Spain last week, has caused 222 deaths and, according to the count provided by the authorities a week later, 89 missing. But, in addition to the human losses, the materials have been gigantic. The floods devastated homes, infrastructure, businesses and Tens of thousands of vehicles were swept away and left piled up in narrow streets and underground parking lots or buried in the mud. Although the final figures have yet to be known, as of yesterday, the Insurance Compensation Consortium had registered more than 44,000 requests for help in relation to vehicles and automobiles.
The situation is that many affected people do not know what happened to their vehicle that was swept away by the floods. To alleviate this, an initiative has emerged that has crystallized in a collaborative website to help identify and geolocate vehicles swept away in floodssometimes for kilometers.
This is tucochedana.es, a website created by Rene Molinastudent at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and Juan Francisco SolerProfessor of Programming, according to 20minutos, and which has been online since last Saturday.
Under a very simple interface presided over by the motto ‘Where is my car?’the website presents the options of ‘Check lost vehicles‘ and ‘Register found vehicle‘. In the first case, and to protect the privacy of the information, you do not access a list of located vehicles, but you must enter your own license plate to see if it is in the database built with the contributions of collaborators.
In the second, collaborators can enter the data of those they have found: license plate, make, color, location, address, photo and additional details. You can also provide geolocation using mobile GPSbut if this is not possible, for example due to lack of coverage, you can manually enter latitude and longitude of the place where the vehicle is located.
Tucochedana.es will soon include a new functionality that will allow you to add the license plate of a vehicle lost by DANA, and the website will send an alert if it enters its database.
At the moment, tucochedana.es includes the location of more than 1,000 vehicles. ‘It’s time to help in every way possible, register cars in affected areas and help their owners locate them,’ reads the section. ‘Information about the project’ of the web.