Daniel and Mohamed had been neighbors for four months when they had their first coffee together. It was in the early morning of October 29-30, the night DANA caused more than 200 deaths in Valencia and devastated its municipality, Massanassa. And they did it after rescuing by hand and swim six people who were about to be swept away by the flood. Coffee was shared between everyone.
Daniel, a 30-year-old Colombian asylum seeker, lives one block away on Calle San Joan. His house is on the first floor, door 1; At Mohamed’s, on the first floor, door two, right next door. Since Daniel’s arrival in the building, they had exchanged greetings on the stairs or on the landing, but they had never stopped to chat. They were strangers. The night of the floods, Mohamed, a Moroccan living in Spain for 24 years, discovered that the person with whom he shares a landing is a prankster with many fangs and capable of risking his life to save strangers. Daniel realized that he had a welcoming and endearing neighbor.
That night the rising ravines caught them home. Daniel was on sick leave and Mohamed was not working because of the threat of rain. Around seven thirty, the Colombian saw from his window how Pedro, a 33-year-old man with a beard, an umbrella hanging on his back and a blue cap, climbed onto the hood of a white van parked in his car. . portal to prevent the flood from carrying it away.
Cars floating in the street
“Come on, move forward!” Daniel began to shout, seeing that his street had become in a few minutes one of the main flood routes in Massanassa. Although it was a small, single-lane road with narrow sidewalks, the water lashed hard. Under his window, he saw bags of ham-flavored chips and boxes of shortbread from one of the neighborhood supermarkets floating. Also cars and butane bottles.
Pedro did not reach Daniel’s window, neither by jumping nor by stretching out his arms, but he reached that of his neighbor Mohamed. “Wait, wait, I’ll call him,” replied the Colombian. From the hood of the van, Pedro watched Mohammed turn on the lights in his house and raise the blinds.
The first thing this neighbor did was give the Moroccan the umbrella, the cell phone and all his identification documents. That way, if he failed to save himself and someone called on the phone, Mohamed could tell them that the water had swept him away.
Pedro was surprised by the flood on his way home from work. It ended at 6:26 p.m. in a municipal industrial zone where it is carrying out labeling work. It generally takes ten minutes to cross the town which has just over 10,000 inhabitants. But when he saw how much the ground was flooded, he decided to stop. He climbed a fence at an institute, with the idea of waiting for the water to pass. “My sneakers were new and I didn’t want to get them wet,” he thought at that moment.
But the water has not subsided. Quite the contrary. Soon, Pedro decided to sacrifice his sneakers and continue walking. First with water up to his ankles. Then, by the knee. When he reached his waist, he decided to get into the car that was right in front of Daniel and Mohamed’s door. There, already sitting on the hood of the car, he wrote to his sister and began to call 112. “This phone does not exist,” was the only thing he heard on the other end of the line.
From the hood, he could see the lights of an emergency car reflecting in the windows of the buildings. He thought they would come and rescue him. But when she finally saw him approaching, she realized that the car was in fact empty. He was being carried away by the current. “When I see it deserted and floating like the others, I say: ‘Fuck, if it doesn’t save me, I’m going to fuck it anyway,'” he recalled three weeks later. Pedro began to lose his composure. And the van, to wobble.
Saved half an hour before the alert
That’s when Daniel and Mohamed spring into action. They grabbed Pedro by the shoulders and pulled him into the house through the window. Now safe, he sent a message to his sister. It was 7:37 p.m., more than half an hour before the Generalitat Valenciana sent the alert to cell phones. “On the sidewalk of the Mercadona parking lot, I climbed on the roof of a truck and above, two neighbors opened the window of their house for me and I climbed on. “I’m fine, wet above the knee, but it’s okay,” he wrote. “Thank you very much, please,” his sister replied.
A few minutes later, Daniel, Pedro and Mohamed began to hear cries for help. Those of two women who work in one of the neighborhood supermarkets and who had hung on the door of the building to ask for help. At that time, the water was already one meter high. The two residents of San Joan Street came down to pick them up. There were already three people rescued and Mohamed offered them clothes to change into. The Moroccan neighbor remembers that night like a horror film. “It was very impressive to see how the water increased from one moment to the next, it was two and a half meters in less than an hour,” says Daniel.
Subsequently, other requests for help arrived. Two local residents, a boy and a girl, stuck in the middle of the flood and lit by the light of neighbors’ flashlights that were pointed at them from blocks across the street. They were also, like Pedro, on the hood of a car, but they did not reach Daniel’s balcony. They were a meter away, they couldn’t rescue them manually. At that moment Daniel thought, “A rope? There is no rope, so sheets. They tied up at least seven sheets and threw them over the balcony. Mohamed fractured a rib during the rescue, but they managed to save both.
Daniel and Mohamed tried to use the same formula, tied sheets, to continue rescuing people trapped in the flood. But the force of the water grew stronger and stronger, destroying everything in its path. A mother and son couldn’t hold on, they let go of the sheets, but managed to hang on to the fence at the main gate of the property. Daniel ran downstairs. But by then the water had already carried the woman away. Only his son remained, in shock. “I heard him asking for help,” Daniel remembers. He was afraid when he immersed himself in the “very cold” water, half a meter away from completely covering the landing. He didn’t know if he would have time to save the child and return home. When he arrived at the door, the boy did not want to leave with him. “My mother, my mother,” he shouted. But the Colombian insisted: “Come in, we’ll watch.” » Mohamed was waiting for them on the stairs, who helped them enter the apartment.
Suddenly, in the midst of the drama, six strangers found themselves in the same room, sharing coffee. All soaked, without lid, without electricity, lit by candlelight. And without knowing where and how his friends and family were. Six neighbors who had crossed paths who knows how many times in the streets of Massanassa, but who had never had a conversation before. “Listen, Mohamed, we saved six lives,” Daniel said to his new friend, looking at the group. The six spent the night together, until the sun rose and everyone could return home and see the destruction caused by the flood.
Three weeks after that day, in the same place where his neighbors saved him, Pedro, wearing the same blue cap, remembers that night. He is very grateful for the help Mohamed and Daniel gave him this afternoon. “If my people saved me, I must contribute and help in one way or another,” he thought a few hours after the tragedy. Two days after the floods, he went to the town hall to register as a volunteer and contribute to the reconstruction of Massanassa. He works in a municipal food bank. “Now he’s the one who helps us,” Daniel said.
Photo provided by Daiana Girotti
