A woman, her mother and two daughters aged two years and five months survived on a table as the house flooded until a huge log blocked the water supply.
Employees of 112 in Valencia had been reporting a breakdown for days that prevented them from answering calls during DANA
Standing on a mattress above a table, Sharon Parra, her mother and her daughters – one aged two years and the other five months – watched on October 29 as the water level continued to rise inside their house. Sharon grabbed her cell phone and called David, her husband, who was working in Toledo.
“Thank you for all my love, I love you very much, we love you with all our hearts,” she said through tears. “If we get out of here alive, I hope I can hug you really tight again.”
David Carvajal abandoned everything he was doing, took his car and headed to Cheste, 30 kilometers from València, a municipality where this Colombian family had rented a small house in the countryside, just below a ravine.
“We were very happy there, we had chickens, dogs, ducks… And it seemed like an ideal place to raise our daughters,” they both remember last Friday in Alboraia, in an apartment facing the the sea that a social entity offered them for a year. week. .
David attends the interview wearing women’s pajama pants. Along with the shirt he’s wearing, it’s the only thing he owns. The clothes Sharon wears aren’t hers either. They both lost everything in their small house in Cheste, completely devastated by the storm.
“We lost everything: the house, the clothes, the memories… We only had time to recover the girls’ papers, clothes and a few toys,” they explain while their eldest daughter, Zofie, flits around in the house.
A tree blocks the water supply
Sharon will never forget the day the water washed away her entire house. On October 29 at eight in the morning, the first leaks began to appear in his home. At 10:30 a.m., he left his home and found that the dirt road in front of his house had turned into a river.
“That’s when I got scared and I called 112, I told them I was with two very little girls and I was worried, I asked them if anyone could come and help us,” she remembers. “They told me nothing was happening and if water got into the house I would call them back. »
Sharon didn’t know it, but by that time the emergency service was already starting to overflow, as several 112 employees explained to elDiario.es: “The waiting time was increasing and the calls were piling up “, say these sources.
Sharon points out the pine tree that came into her house and blocked the water from entering.
This woman and her mother, Alba, packed bags in case they had to leave the house quickly. They put their most important papers and clothes for the girls there. But around noon the rain stopped and they calmed down. They even took Zofie outside to splash in the water.
Everything deteriorated further around 5:30 p.m. After half an hour of rain again, the water was up to his knees inside the house. All the dirty water from the septic tank started coming out of the toilet. Sharon started trying to hit the chimney to break it and try to escape through it. “I was desperate,” she recalls. “The only thing I did was ask them to get us out of there.”
A deafening noise left them paralyzed. A large pine tree had broken one of the windows and partially penetrated the house. At that time, they didn’t know it, but this tree was blocking the window and blocking the water from entering the house.
While all this was happening, David, who works as a security systems integrator, was trying to rush back from Toledo. Around 10 p.m., he stopped all contact with his wife and daughters and assumed the worst.
“I started telling my classmates what possessions each of them would be able to keep,” he remembers in tears last Friday. “I thought they were all dead and I was going to kill myself.”
After spending the night on the table, Sharon saw that dawn was breaking and the rain had stopped. Everything was destroyed: the pipes, the henhouse, the garden, the rooms… They were alive, but the house remained uninhabitable, full of fecal water from the septic tank.
Seeing Sharon, her mother and the girls inside the house through a window, the neighbors couldn’t believe it. “We assumed you were dead,” they told them when they arrived. They took shovels and started removing the mud to unlock the door and be able to leave the house.
“We are born again,” explain this woman and her mother. “When we came out, we couldn’t stop crying.” They took refuge in their neighbor’s house until David arrived and they all melted into an endless embrace.
Climbing onto a mattress above the table, the water almost drowned this Colombian family.
Looking for accommodation
After surviving the flood, without even clothes to wear, this family began looking for a new home. But, according to his account, in the majority of apartments they called, they responded with refusals when they discovered they were Colombian.
“These days we have seen the best side of Spain, which has been the solidarity of many people,” says David, who has been taking medication for a few days after suffering an anxiety attack. “But we also saw the worst, the racism that is still present in certain parts of society.”
The family launched a campaign on the networks to find an address which generated a wave of solidarity. Temporarily, a social entity, called Unleash Your Potential, managed to find them a temporary apartment facing the sea in Alboraia, in the suburbs of Valencia. However, this temporary solution expires this Wednesday.
“When we arrived here and saw the sea, we didn’t believe it, but now we have to find a solution,” both explained from their homes. “We have money to pay rent which is not very expensive,” they emphasize.
After being born again, Sharon, David, Alba, Zofie and Zoe want to start again. “After what happened, everything seems like a small thing to us,” they concluded. “We are ready to fight to move forward. »
