“We brought back the books in good condition and erected barricades to prevent theft”

“The water came here.” Jorge Cabezas, owner of Benetússer’s bookstore Somnis paper Accompanied by Laia, his companion, he places his hand at the level of his eyebrows, which, in other circumstances, could be confused with a military salute. On the afternoon of Tuesday, October 29, his business, like many others in the city and ten other bookstores in the area, was flooded by a waterspout that reached six feet in height.

That day, it had barely rained in Benetússer, a few minutes early in the morning. In the afternoon, given the bad weather with strong gusts of wind, intermittent power outages and the low influx of people, Jorge sent home the employee who accompanied him and he himself left late around seven in the morning. “But when I got home, my brother called me to tell me that the water was coming from his streetwhich is located near the bookstore. I didn’t hear anything about him until the next day,” Jorge remembers of what remains of his bookstore, today a place already empty of mud but also of books.

“I went back to the bookstore and put all the materials half a meter high, thinking that If the water came, it wouldn’t be more than a span. During this time, I heard people saying “the water is coming, the water is coming”, but I continued to place books. “Not a drop of water had fallen from the sky, so Jorge was still calm. His precautions were going to be completely insufficient, but that He couldn’t know. No one had warned him. It was yet another day .the fall of Fredalike every year”, he thought.

“Then I heard screaming.”It’s here, it’s here‘. I left the bookstore around 8:10 p.m. because I couldn’t do anything else and went home. The water came up to my ankles. I turned the corner and I was already up to my knees. “When I got home, I looked out the window and the water was up to the car windows. That’s when the famous emergency alarm went off on the cell phone.”

Jorge shares his story with the solvency and calmness of someone who has told the same thing thousands of times. “Throughout the night there was a brutal noise. It sounded BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. Like huge explosions. It was cars crashing into each other.” No one in the area could sleep that night. Some, like the owner of Somnis de Paper, heard these noises like a war zone, others testify hearing voices of neighbors calling for helpbut it was impossible to leave the house to help anyone.

And then the next day came. After visiting his brother’s house and making sure he was okay, Jorge approached Paper’s Somnis. “When we arrived, there was nothing. There was nothing left. What the water couldn’t wash away was that it stopped in certain places like the columns. Otherwise, the ground was a quagmire, a kind of concoction in which paper and clay were mixed“. Three shelves had withstood the impact of the water, the rest were swept away half a kilometer away. Of the approximately 8,000 books they had, about 100 survived.

“It used to be like a bank. The glass we have here is bulletproof. They broke like it was nothing.” If the enemies had been criminals armed with firearms, the bookstore would have withstood the projectiles without any problem. But what they faced has no fear of any armor. The water went through the glass on one side of the business, which is on the corner of Benetússer’s main street, and then hit the interior on the other side until the glass shattered . “Then a current was created that destroyed everything,” says Jorge, showing the photographs from the next day. “If he had surprised us inside, we would probably be dead“.

For the next two days, the residents of Benetússer were alone: ​​”we only had ourselves. Family, friends, neighbors.” Jorge and Laia They started the reconstruction work. They counted the damage, checked what could be saved. The books in good condition were brought home, due to the risk of theft.

Because at that time, while the majority of the population was still licking their wounds or helping those hardest hit by the disaster, a few devoted themselves to plunder. Some of them, for example, fought in supermarkets for a bottle of Jack Daniels or a leg of Iberian ham.

Others entered local businesses like Jorge’s: “The first nights were chaos, They came in even when we were inside“Who knows what they wanted to take. Perhaps a Don Quixote, from whom they could learn values. Perhaps a Bible, either to review these ten commandments that they had forgotten, or to confide in God. Book shelves then had a new function, “like barricades, to prevent anyone from entering”.

It was from the third day that the volunteers began to arrive “with a lot of strength, with a lot of enthusiasm. It was the young people who helped the most. About a hundred people came to help and left everything very clean “. While remembering that moment, Jorge walks with goosebumps on his arm through the bookstore, empty except for three shelves with books on the two highest shelves. “We have seen the best and worst of people“.

Jorge is also secretary of the Valencia booksellers corporation. A few days ago, during a meeting with the Minister of Culture Urtasun, they asked him, on behalf of all the bookstores concerned, “to be lax, without losing rigor, but understanding that a large part of the documentation was also taken away“Invoices, checks, insurance papers: anything that wasn’t digitized ended up getting lost in the mud.

In total, Somnis de Paper lost approximately €120,000 in actions, to which is added an additional €30,000 of damage to furniture and infrastructure. But for the majority of claims, no invoice can be provided. “The solution is to give them an inventory of what we had the day of the flood, which I saved on the computer. That’s the only thing I can offer. They have to decide if they believe me or not. I can.” I don’t offer them bills, I can’t give them anything else.”

Once again, the positive side in this sense comes from the selfless help of the population: “People buy from us on the Web now more than was purchased in the three years of the store’s activity. onlineAnd”.

But nevertheless, This creates another problem.. Several bookstores in the area were forced to declare the cessation of their activities. “People want to help us by buying books, and we are very grateful, but at the moment it puts us in a difficult situation. We don’t even have any books to sell, the actions which appears on the site is the one before DANA”.

Faced with this situation, the owner of Somnis de Paper offers an alternative: “If you want to support us, For now, it’s better to do it through donations. A donation may be justified from a cash flow perspective, but not a sale, as this would mean that the business is still in operation despite the declaration of cessation. » Jorge nevertheless adds: “It is in any case our particular case. , I don’t know What is the position and situation of the rest of the bookstores concerned?

The reality is that there is still a long way to go. “We don’t know when we will be able to reopen. For now. We don’t know when help will arrive or how.. We also don’t know what the next few weeks are going to look like or if we’re going to be able to leave this in good shape. “Glaziers, plumbers, electricians and masons are going to be in high demand.”

Little by little, who knows at what pace, normality will return to Benetússer, Catarroja, Paiporta and the sixty-eight other Valencian municipalities affected by DANA. The streets will no longer be muddy, local businesses like Somnis de Paper and the ten other damaged bookstores will once again raise their shutters. All this mud will therefore already be dry and will no longer be earth, but Terrettewhich looks like a house.