The image of the destruction of “ground zero” of DANA, in the suburbs of Valencia, remains immense but not static. If in the first days it was the volunteers who came on foot who began to change it, bringing all kinds of help, now it is the large machines of the Army and the EMU which are definitively changing the landscape. A work that is progressing, more than a week after the floods, with a sustained pace but an environment still very chaotic where soldiers, security force agents and volunteers from all over Spain are working.
“You can’t leave here. The street is closed so that we can work with the machines,” repeats one of the 7,800 soldiers already deployed. “We arrived in Catarroja on Sunday. We now have this assigned area. We really appreciate all the help from volunteers as it has been greatly needed, but now we need to organize everything better to avoid getting in each other’s way. Because here, what we need is for heavy machines to work,” he comments, at a crossroads where trucks and cranes work, in the Barracas district, the oldest in the city. .
A few streets away, Rafa, who lives in the neighboring town of Silla, continues to help the parents of his partner, Raquel. Rafa saw how they took out the bodies of three victims in a car stuck at the roundabout in front of the local train station, not far from his in-laws’ house: “The railway wall acted like a funnel The neighbor of ‘a house in the neighboring street had to tear down the partition of its house to enter the staircase and go up to the first floor. “That’s how he was saved.”
It is mid-morning and volunteers continue to arrive with shovels and rakes, boxes of cleaning products… They have to make their way to avoid the streets occupied by army machines. It’s the other army, the one that arrived when state aid had not yet arrived.
Las Barracas is a neighborhood of one- and two-story houses, some over a hundred years old, with doors adorned with colorful tiles that have withstood the onslaught of water. From one of these houses Mari Carmen appears. “This is the house where my husband was born, it belonged to his great-grandmother. And look, none of them jumped,” he says, looking inside at the tiles that adorn the walls. “But we had to throw away everything, refrigerator, washing machine, oven. Thank God I had put the writings on a high cabinet… When people call me and ask me “how are you”, sometimes I answer that it’s good, I just took a trip to Venice. And they’re happy that I still want to make jokes. But what are we going to do? “We are alive,” she adds, clinging to the bars of the solid wooden gate, her eyes watering. She is 77 years old, “78 next month,” she says after thanking a friend who came to deliver oranges brought by volunteers. A volunteer is also the nurse who, a few meters away, treats the feet of a neighbor destroyed by hours spent soaking in mud.
“They helped a lot here the first days, they were the ones who brought us food, ordinary people who came on foot,” says a neighbor, leaning out of the window while a tractor with a shovel works below for the remove from the ground. road little by little. What a week ago were the furniture, books, clothes, beds, souvenirs of the inhabitants and now it is a brown mass of garbage.
An Easter balcony hanging from a window, which a neighbor turned over to write: “Thank you so much to everyone for coming to help. We are very grateful. You are hell, Spaniards. This is not the only message read. There is a great feeling of gratitude on the part of the population towards the volunteers who appeared in the streets, main roads and alleys of Paiporta, Alfafar, Catarroja, Benetúser when the mud had transformed them into a large anthill, when there was no light or water here. . , nor food, when the anguish of those who missed each other cut off words and breath.
Many continue to travel from various parts of Spain, ready to spend a few days off or on vacation in order to “lend a hand where they can”. And if at the beginning it was about giving food and water to those who had nothing left, today it’s about using a shovel to help remove mud from the sidewalks. Many discover this when they have already arrived with a car full of food or various products and find that they have nowhere to unload or distribute them. “We’ve been working on this for a day and a half. “First they sent us to the City of Arts and they told us they were already full, then to Mestalla and the same,” said two boys standing with their car in the Catarroja industrial zone on Wednesday.
“The reality is you pass virtually every street and you see progress every day. There were days where, between our arrival and our departure in the evening, it seemed to be something else and that’s when we progress. But of course, now everything is gone, the water is already drained from the garages, there remains a whole city of garbage that has to be removed with heavy machines,” explains David Lladó, from the NGO Open Arms, who is present in ‘ground zero’ and this Wednesday he helped, with his eight volunteers, to evacuate water from some garages in Benetúser “There is a bit of what I call the “Ukraine effect” which is occurring. here, since everyone supports us enormously But if the first two days we heard “we have no water”, now we find ourselves in places where there are first aid stations everywhere. You see in the morning. that there are eight pallets of water jugs and you leave in the evening and the eight pallets are still there,” adds Lladó. “There is a problem of coordination but also of communication.”
“On the sidewalk, please, on the sidewalk!”, warns an officer at a crossroads on Camí Nou Avenue, which crosses Benetúser, when a group of young people, carrying shovels, crosses the road where waiting a tractor to be able to pass. Many had to come on foot from the industrial zone of Catarroja or even further, due to restrictions on the movement of private vehicles which were stricter this Wednesday in the areas affected by the floods.
“There is a feeling of chaos, there is no point in organizing, someone to say ‘here are the bins, here is it…’. Suddenly someone appears with a truck, with a shovel, with the shovel and between them, they see what the street looks like and they shoot… “, comments an agent of Ertzaintza, who arrived here with a group of companions , in his time. rest and that they self-organized with other security force volunteers present in the area. “Lack of control”, “Disorganization”, this is what other agents and firefighters who arrived voluntarily also repeat.
The movement of vehicles towards the “zero point” caused traffic jams and traffic jams, especially in the morning on the streets of Valencia. A collapse which formed queues on Tuesday that lasted hours, unauthorized private vehicles being cut off from access, with a chaotic coming and going of heavy machinery, military vehicles, cars and vans.
“The problem is not the people. The problem is that everything is disorganized. The entrances and exits are not very coordinated and they exit and enter at the same time via the same routes. An organization could have been done in quadrants so that the army could work in one place, leaving the volunteers in a second zone to move from zone to zone. And now there are blockages that prevent the work of the UME, the army or the firefighters,” commented Antonio Caballero on Tuesday, late in the afternoon, at the door of the building where he lives in Paiporta, where electric power had returned to several areas.
Meanwhile, in the street, a member of the UEM, equipped with a loudspeaker, repeated that the passage must be speeded up as much as possible. Caballero lives on Maestro Palau street, a few steps from the roundabout where, on Sunday, the arrival of the king, the president of the government, Pedro Sánchez, and the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, sparked a protest with shouts and jets of mud and objects. Anger is a feeling that has not disappeared from the streets, but the progress of the cleaning work acts as a balm, after days of waiting which have warmed the spirits already overwhelmed by helplessness and pain.
