There is no place on my body where I haven’t found mud every night for the last five days. From my fingernails to the hair on my head, I have faced mud since a flood forever transformed my adopted city, Aldaia, and all of our lives. Since we had to take brushes, shovels and buckets to bail out and clean up. Like all my neighbors and the number of people who come to help us, I am filled with mud, a substance as viscous as the rage that invades us.
While the kings arrived in Paiporta with a large procession, a farmer from La Rioja arrived in my town yesterday. He got on his tractor, left his work in the fields halfway and decided to go wherever he was needed. Using its suction pump, we were able to begin emptying one of the city’s flooded garages which, after five days, still had floor to ceiling water.
Now that I have stopped working because of the orange alert, I am filled with gratitude for the wave of citizen solidarity and anger at the slow institutional response. The memory of the lack of warnings from the Generalitat Valenciana, despite reliable data that warned of extreme risk, comes to mind and makes me angry.
This indignation extends to the point of noting a too timid response from institutions to the disaster. Until today, November 3, there is not enough heavy machinery that has arrived in Aldaia to be able to move forward in cleaning the streets and removing the mountains of furniture, cars, household appliances and souvenirs that water washed away and mud destroyed.
We need all the machinery and specialist knowledge possible to eliminate what accumulates on our streets, we need the supply of food and basic necessities to be restored and we need the State to scale the current emergency and help will also be needed later. The processes of expertise and payment of sums through the insurance consortium are very slow and rare. If we want to return to normal as quickly as possible, we must provide human and material resources as quickly as possible. Homes, businesses and lives must be rebuilt. And this cannot wait even for a second or be delegated to the voluntarism of those who want to add their grain of sand. Furthermore, we run the serious risk of conditioning the level of response on the economic capacity of the people concerned. Leaving the ability to rebuild lives in the hands of the market would be even more catastrophic.
The lack of vision and responsibility of all institutions has led to real disasters. Not only because of the current scenario, but also because the repeated warnings about the effects of climate change, about the consequences of city and consumption models designed for car-dependent mobility and enormous quantities of fossil fuels and energy have been ignored time and time again. Claims from groups of scientists that infrastructure and urban development in flood zones or that destroyed the protective natural environments themselves were crushed in the same way that water crushed houses on the night of October 29 , the consequences of climate change are here to stay. We face the choice between mitigating the worst effects and adapting our environments, our cities, our consumption patterns and our cities, or regretting it again and seeing anger and exhaustion become more and more common.
The mud will stay with us, as will the awareness that this too must change.
