Sitting on her father’s walker, next to the mud-covered furniture on the sidewalk in front of her house, Beatriz Frau stares into space. A week has passed since torrential rains and an immense wave, overflowing the Magro River, devastated the town of Algemesí, a rural town of 27,000 inhabitants, surrounded by orange and persimmon trees, 35 kilometers south of Valencia. Here, as in the rest of the province, where the floods left 211 dead and 78 missing, a return to normality seems distant.
On Wednesday, November 6, Beatriz Frau finished clearing and cleaning the devastated ground floor of her modest house. This 40-year-old garden center employee still has no electricity and goes to shower with the neighbors, like the rest of her family. With her two children, her niece and her parents living with her, she remains stuck. in the Raval neighborhood, whose streets are still nothing more than deep quagmires.
He’s supposed to go back to work on Monday, but he doesn’t know how he’ll get there yet. “Neither the firefighters nor the military came here”he said, his face distorted by a grimace. It is the city council that designates priority neighborhoods and streets, explains World an army officer, deployed in large numbers in the city. The one in Raval, poor and marginal, with an immigrant majority, located on the other side of the disused railway tracks, has been forgotten or abandoned.
“Apart from the volunteers, no one helped us”confirms Emilia Saba, very psychologically affected. To get to the house of this 60-year-old unemployed woman, you have to make your way through mountains of mud and bad-smelling garbage. Around her, half a dozen young people who came to lend her a hand, armed with brooms, brooms and masks over their noses, help her empty her house of furniture soaked in dirty water, where she thought she would die on October 29. “The water slipped under the door, then broke a window and began to rise until it exceeded one meter. I spent the night perched on a stepladder, with my husband, usually on life support, while my daughter and grandson climbed on the furniture.remember.
In the morning, relatives and neighbors managed to break down the door. Since then, she and her husband sleep at her sister’s house, her 40-year-old daughter on a mattress on the floor, while her grandson is at an aunt’s house. There is nothing left in his house and power has not been restored. “I lack strength. “My house was not insured, so I would not have the right to compensation.”duck.
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