Valencia wakes up on the Day of the Dead with more than 200 deaths on the table. But in the capital, a little quieter than usual, families dressed for the holidays walk in the parks and groups of young people have breakfast on the terraces. There are taxis, pedestrian crossings and cars move quickly on the main avenues. A normal vacation, except for bikes loaded with jugs of water and groups of people carrying bags and backpacks. They go to ground zero, to Horta Sud, the epicenter of the biggest disaster in living memory, seven kilometers from the Town Hall square of Spain’s third city. Bus 27 is carrying an army of broom-wielding youths who aren’t from Halloween witches’ hangovers. At seven stops, the door opens. Welcome to The Tower.
The ground is still brown and neighbors continue to struggle to get rid of the mud by hand, with precarious tools. These are groups of friends who look at each other from time to time: they don’t know when it will end or if it will be of any use. There is a lack of trucks and water cannons to effectively remove the mud, and streets must be dredged. For someone visiting La Torre for the first time, the worst DANA of the century could have happened yesterday, not three days ago. Some have sometimes recovered electricity and water. Surviving there, where there are no shops, no doctors, no supermarkets, is still a question of friends, charity and destiny.
Apart from a few trucks and a few overflowing police patrols, which put up no-passage strips that no one respects, there is nothing to indicate that the State is coming here. The avalanche of volunteers arrives at La Torre without anyone directing them. The Valencia Local Police has a canopy with a person to direct the aid operation. There is a lot of desire to do something, but all the logistics are missing. Valence Town Hall has just set up a food distribution point in the neighborhood managed by an NGO. They are “lucky” because since the floods, they have had to walk a kilometer every day to look for food.
There is a lot of anger in La Torre: “These damn photos, I don’t know why they come here to take photos,” says a twenty-year-old girl astride a two-year-old girl. There is anger for the dead, for the houses that are no longer homes and especially because it is the third day of management alone.
Like in Catarroja, Sedaví, Picanya, Massanassa, Chiva. As in Alfafar, whose mayor desperately asked this Thursday for someone to come: “There are people who live in houses with dead people.” He comes from the PP, as well as from the regional government, but he did not hesitate to criticize the fact that no one had arrived. “We have a local police force and a regional patrol. “We had to empty a supermarket and distribute. » They asked volunteer health workers to help them or bring them medicine. Even if there is damage, childbirth, viruses or appendicitis do not stop. The day was sunny, the cold had passed and Alfafar continued to survive thanks to volunteers and barter.
No one could enter Catarroja until Thursday. Masses of cars, apocalypses in the streets, without electricity, water or telephone to ask for help from the elderly or in an emergency. There are neighbors who had to walk 10 kilometers to get to their relatives’ homes. We leave on foot, walking in the mud and avoiding piles of cars because there is no infrastructure. Currently, an unknown number of bodies remain to be found and families know nothing about theirs. This also has a public health aspect, because the decomposition of corpses, especially in a muddy and humid environment, can lead to illness.
A woman gave birth in Silla at the height of the floods. There are those who had to drink a glass of water, if they were lucky, a day. Like Silvia, affected by the flood in Aldaia: “We were around 15 people sheltering in a corner of a polygon standing for six hours in the rain, we saw a waterspout pass with doors, containers and even a truck trailer. .” She survived thanks to the solidarity of Ana and Greta, who sheltered her, clothed her and fed her with their families.
After the tragedy, and in the absence of rapid management to mitigate the effects of the shortage, favor chains had to be set up, the buildings were transformed into common pantry and accommodated elderly and children with volunteers and health workers who were also trapped in many cities. Someone walked someone to get their car, someone lent someone their phone, and someone got someone else’s blood pressure pills. In the midst of this chaos, looting and arrests for vandalism and car thefthomes and supermarkets. The lack of agents, light and basic supplies served as a mortar to the chaos and anger.
The local police in each municipality do what they can. Before the floods swept through their towns, they had no information or coordination about what was coming. They don’t have much now either. In Benetússer, where the tongue of water has erased the police station from the map, they have neither shoes for themselves nor equipment to help the neighbors. “Here, we see trucks passing by, but not for just anyone, we ask the neighbors for things, a generator, and we help others as best we can,” said an agent on Friday afternoon.
Even if the situation is gradually improving in certain municipalities – the army has finally arrived in Paiporta – it is difficult to understand why post-war precariousness has imposed itself 15 minutes by car from the capital .
First, because a quantity of liters equivalent to four times the capacity of the Ebro fell into the ravine. This must be combined with the lack of speed of the Generalitat in requesting extraordinary resources from the State, a questionable management which adds to the criticism. the lack of action to prevent the damage from the worst DANA of the century, with alerts arriving too late.
The first time the Valencian government asked the central office to send reinforcements from the UME (the Military Emergency Unit, dependent on the Ministry of Defense), was Tuesday at noon for Utiel. During the night, at 8:36 p.m. and when all of Horta Sud was already devastated, the Mazón government requested more reinforcements, which could only be deployed when the waters calmed.
They waited until Thursday to request more troops to help with logistics, although by then requests for help from mayors and neighbors were already a clamor. In addition, the management of the emergency, in the hands of the Government of the Valencian Community, distributed the military units unequally. There are populations who have it and others who do not. Some regional administrations have offered to collaborate, such as Catalonia, which has not yet been requested. The same thing happened with the Valencia wildland firefighters, who said they wanted to help and were “underutilized.”
Added to the scale of the tragedy and the response times are the difficulties of mobility for citizens and access to machines and the army in certain municipalities. The floods devastated local roads, destroyed bridges and damaged four essential roads for Valencia: the one that goes to Madrid, the one that goes to Alicante and the ring road, still full of cars and with the remains of the loads that hundreds of trucks lost . . The rail connection with Madrid will be interrupted for at least two weeks. The metro does not expect to return to normal for months. Road collapses since the Tuesday of the tragedy have been frequent.
To organize all this mobility, the Generalitat’s accounts are limited to “asking” people not to go to DANA areas or not to take the car. For the moment, this appeal has had no effect and heavy military and civilian aid vehicles are having serious difficulty traveling or repairing the roads.
There are localities that have seen firefighters or water tankers to relieve thirst, but not the military or a logistical plan to help with daily problems or clean-up. For example, in La Torre, where the EMU is expected to arrive in the coming hours and domestic brooms remain the main tool. The festive Friday morning was synonymous with cleaning without seeing the end and continuing to look for food. Someone asks in the church square if there is soup or something hot. In many houses you cannot cook, even if some have a small stove. A human chain carries boxes of donations so those who were enjoying a casual meal on comfy tablecloths Tuesday can eat.
I turn around. I walk and leave. In 20 minutes, we can abandon La Torre and leave a traumatized world with survival problems while thousands of volunteers flock there on this festive Friday, on their way to saturate the roads without, once again, the The competent administration takes no effective measures to prevent it. . prevent
Silvia also made this journey from hell to normality, but she did it by bus. From Aldaia to Valencia: “They accompanied me very far, to the Cristo district, to see if I could go to Valencia and from there to my home, in Barcelona, because I had come here to work.” He had lost his car, his suitcase, he had survived by drinking little, not being able to wash, and rationing food. A bus came by and picked up Silvia. Arriving in the capital this Thursday, the bus doors spit it out in the center of the city, next to the Plaza de España. The weather was nice. He was wearing borrowed sneakers, small for his height and full of mud. “I was shocked. The bars were open and people were laughing.
