Imagine that overnight, all the businesses in your town disappear. The package that was waiting for you at the Post Office is no longer there, because there is no Post Office. You can’t buy water, rice or chocolate treats at the supermarket. The fruit store has vanished. Forget buying fresh meat or fish without changing cities. To get deodorant, you have to go to another place. He hasn’t smelled like baked bread for a month. Of course, he didn’t drink beer in any bar, because there aren’t any. You can’t buy underwear anywhere or washing machine softener.
This is how Catarroja (30,000 inhabitants, in Horta Sud) has lived since October 30, one of the last localities where the army was able to enter after the floods. A hill of scrap metal and cars welcomes the visitor who will find, at every sign of normal life, a Fallas farm and a place to donate and collect cans, used clothing or packaged food. The mud covers everything. Here, one of the deadliest waterways passed through a sloping street whose name, a premonition of the danger, is “la rambleta”.
Houses have four or five stories, so basements and garages are most affected. The Plaza del Fumeral is to Catarroja what Gran Vía is to Madrid, an open-air shopping center. A square square which had a park with benches and games for children. Today, in its place, 20 centimeters of mud. It is surrounded by more than 20 commercial establishments which are now closed, after more than two meters of water entered them. Many of them are open and without doors. Others, with broken blinds.
Miguel is the owner of the local real estate agency, which sold and rented apartments in Horta Sud. The flood caught him in the store. Him, his saleswoman and niece Sandra, a secretary, a customer who didn’t know how to swim and a foreigner “who was visiting Spain for the first time and wanted to buy an apartment, imagine what impression he had”, says this man from business. sitting “cool” on a plastic chair on a western day that kicks up mud dust. He also lost a house worth 500,000 euros and two cars. He now lives with his parents. They all swam to a fence. From there, they were able to enter a portal.
“I’ve already cried a lot, and that’s it, I’m going to open and I’ll be the first in Catarroja,” he says happily, while a heat machine dries the plaster of his premises, in which he had invested more than 30,000 euros of reform. All the operations they had signed were canceled. Many people are already afraid of living in these flood zones. “Here a house was rented for around 800 euros”, and warns that “it is very important to set limits, because we are ‘so good people’ that people start to want to increase the prices and that makes us harm to all as a people.” .
Like almost everyone, he is skeptical about the aid to businesses and the self-employed, which can be requested from Tuesday. The skepticism has its roots in the fact that in Catarroja almost everything was cleaned up by residents and volunteers, because public forces arrived later. “Do you know the only one who ever gave me money?” Mercadona, 8,000 euros. This is Juan Roig’s Alcem-se initiative, which grants up to 10,000 euros per company. He will still ask for state and regional aid, which involves more bureaucracy and guarantees since it is public money, “but whatever it is, I will open it. Five families eat here,” he says with Sandra who, like all workers in this town, works at ERTE.
Nacho Albert didn’t just have a place that was wasted. She owned, next to the square, the most famous bakery in the city. Four generations of bakers getting up at midnight. Underneath were hundreds of thousands of dollars of investment, worth the bread makers, mixers, ovens and refrigerators. This is all useless. His insurance was basic and Nacho already knows that we’re not going to pay him, even remotely, for everything he lost.
“No matter how much help they give me, I can’t afford this anymore, just one of the ovens is worth almost 10,000 euros.” He is very clear: “I have already made my CV and I have started looking for a job, let’s see what comes out, the oven is finished.” Even if they earned very well from their activity, it’s “a hard life, I barely saw my two children grow up” and having to do everything again is not worth it, despite the fact that their father ” insists” that they don’t do it. let them lose 40 years of family business. In your case, there is also trauma. His wife, Inma, does not want to return to these places. He miraculously saved his life in one of them, the flood caught him in the store and he had to swim out. He managed to catch a cable in the street. From there to an awning. She screamed but no one heard her. “At the end they saw me with a flashlight. They threw a sheet over me but I no longer had the strength to climb, I was frozen. “Then they threw a ladder at me with a sheet, but it fell into the current.” She ended up clinging to a tree and was miraculously saved by neighbors.
They have decided to change their lives because of the flood, “it generates a little fear, to be honest, but something will come of it”, they say as the neighbors approach them and chat. For now, they have given up one of their premises to serve as a delivery point in the city, a place where people come every few minutes to “do their shopping”.
The ones who aren’t sure what they will do with their lives are Sandra and Eva. They have a cafeteria and a pastry shop in Naticrem Square, which was the meeting point for many elderly people. “It occurred to us to close on the afternoon of the 29th because we saw from the alerts that a lot of rain was going to come, and thank God, because we would have found people here over the age of 70 years and seeing how we would have been registered, we don’t take the child to school either,” explains Sandra. All the machines and premises, some 200,000 euros of investment, have gone to hell, even. if they had to continue to pay the 1,400 euros in rent asked of them this month. “Don’t forget that a good coffee maker costs 5,000 euros.”
“Depending on the aid, we will see, but I am still paying the pandemic aid,” says this hotelier who entered the sector at 21 and who has a two-month-old baby and a five-year-old child. son. The first days they had to take the girl to her parents because they were spending days in Catarroja without electricity or water and they needed to warm up the bottle. “On October 30, I took a bike and with mud up to my waist, I went to see if my parents were okay, because there was no telephone. I climbed on cars. It was war, they wanted to steal my backpack,” she remembers, still impressed. When he went to see his accommodation, which had a terrace with a large tent washed away by the water, he was unable to enter because of the mud blocking the door. “We and the volunteers cleaned everything up here. One day, the firefighters came to lift this machine because it is very heavy, and that’s it. Like all workers in zone zero, they are in ERTE and, like all entrepreneurs and self-employed workers in the zone, they are skeptical about the aid they will receive, the application period for which has just opened. The absence of the State in the first days of the disaster undermined their confidence.
In addition to ERTE, the central government has opened non-refundable aid lines for businesses, water bills are canceled and there will also be aid for homes, cars and property, in addition to what the insurance consortium pays. In some cases, all of this will cover what was lost. In others, many companies believe that the accounts will not be published. There are those who have seen the light of day and those who are exhausted, too exhausted to start from scratch professionally. Sandra is waiting to hear the final balance of the aid to decide if she opens, transfers to another smaller location, or changes direction in her life. “I still cry a lot. But look, I have two hands and I’m going to move forward.”
Leaving the square, a river of people goes down and up the rambleta, where the secondary school was located and which has closed its doors. Some students are in online mode, others have no school, like a child playing with a shovel and his father in the nerve center of Catarroja, today a mudflat. There are soldiers and firefighters everywhere. There are many, but there is still almost nothing.
