The basements of Rue des Arts Graphiques, in Paiporta, became a death trap on the afternoon of the floods. It is a neighborhood of low houses, located just 200 meters from the ravine which overflowed on October 29. Everyone knows someone who died there that day. That afternoon, many reacted similarly when they saw water reaching the basements of their homes. They went down to try to save furniture, clothes, cars or warehouses. But then the flood came. Some managed to escape; others, no.
Amparo’s son and husband managed to survive, although the water hit them while they were still in the cellar. They had gone down to collect the cradle of Amparo’s seven-month-old grandson. They wanted to keep it safe in the living room, to prevent the water from destroying it. They went down with a flashlight, but they already had no light. Amparo realized the situation was critical when she started hearing screams. He then noticed that the water had risen much higher than expected. The flood was already moving up the stairs that connect the basement and main floor of his house.
“They noticed a thump in the back that they think was the water when it came in,” says Amparo, who still has a muddy basement. The force of the flow swept away the garage door and the interior walls of the basements of all the houses on the same block. Suddenly, her son and husband found themselves floating in the mud, their heads almost touching the ceiling. About to drown. “They were diving into the mud to get out. At that point, my husband realized I was still carrying the flashlight. Everything was dark. It was mud,” adds this 61-year-old woman.
The light from the flashlight helped them locate each other. They were near the door. And it was open. His son was the first to come out, then he grabbed his father and took him out. Amparo doesn’t remember how she experienced those minutes of uncertainty. I didn’t know what I could do. Her daughter-in-law tells her that she just screamed: “They are drowning me! »
“We saw death,” explains her husband. When they managed to get out, the whole family hugged each other and cried, aware that they were about to die. They were even more so the next morning, when they learned that two of their neighbors, a couple who lived on the other side of the wall, had died in this same cellar. They had a 16-year-old boy and an eight-year-old boy.
It took him several days to return to the basement.
It took days for Amparo to get back down the stairs. He needed time to recover from what he had experienced. Mud has soaked the walls of the basement, as well as those of the stairs leading to the living room. In a plastic basket covered in mud, he still keeps the clothes destroyed that day. Among the browns, her husband’s burgundy tie stands out.
For eight days, the family lived in mud and stench. They don’t have a door leading to the basement, so a rotting smell came up the stairs. They remained like that, with the garage full of mud, until help arrived. “We all owe it to the volunteers. They deserve a monument. We even had Italians who were on vacation come and help us,” he adds.
They managed to clean it, but this Thursday it was flooded again. The scene was not like that of the morning of October 30 – there was no mud, just two or three fingers of water – but the feeling was. The rains that fell from Wednesday to Thursday, which once again placed the province of Valencia under red notice, have once again put the residents of Paiporta on alert.
This municipality became ground zero for DANA, which caused the death of 216 people. In Paiporta, 45 people died. Thus, in the early hours of Wednesday to Thursday, with a new notice from AEMET, many neighbors were on alert. “Our fear was that the sewers would start to discharge more water and it would rise. We spent the whole night without sleeping, waiting,” explains Amparo.
Fina, her neighbor across the street, also spent the early morning like this. He dumped water all night. Everyone in his family is safe, but he also knows neighbors who died because of DANA: a veterinarian, a lawyer – depending on his story – or a teacher. Her husband also took a risk by taking the car out of the garage and parking it on the sidewalk.
The Generalitat sent this Wednesday around 7:45 p.m. a Civil Protection alert on cell phones in which it communicated the red alert level: “Heavy rains will occur from the afternoon-night of the 13th and during the 14”. Residents of Rue des Arts Grafiques in Paiporta welcomed this decision. However, on October 29, the alert came late, when many communities were already flooded.
“When the alarm went off yesterday [por el miércoles] we were nervous. We knew that if it rained a lot, it would flood again,” explains Teresa, 72, at the door of her house, while several neighbors, led by her husband, installed watering hoses in the cellar to try to to evacuate the water that came in because of the rain to come out with a bomb All the neighbors explain that what they feared most in this second DANA was the sewers. blocked for weeks.
These single-family houses are located at the entrance to the town, next to several industrial zones. The multi-lane road that separates houses from warehouses has become a pool of mud through which army trucks, fire engines and volunteer vans pass.
Teresa’s house faces this road. She lost everything she had in the garage. He spent two or three days without electricity or water. Her daughter, who lives in the center of the town, is homeless. They say they have felt abandoned for days and now fear it will happen again. They live in fear of another flood, not because of the ravine, but because of torrential rains if they do not clean the municipal pipe system. “We know it’s been devastating, but we want them to give us the means,” says Teresa. This Wednesday, when her cell phone started ringing again upon receiving the alert, her daughter had an anxiety attack. The water couldn’t take anything away from him, he had already lost everything.
