Even though the material damage is considerable, Moisés and Raquel are smiling again: running water and electricity arrived at their home on the sixth day of the DANA which hit them so hard. “Thanks to a friend, Juanjo, who miraculously saved Chiva’s life on Tuesday. He’s our idol and what’s more, he didn’t make us pay,” they reply laughing on the phone, after having cried a lot this week.
“From time to time, we break in, we get back into place; We laughed, we cried… I took my shower after six days and it felt fabulous. I missed the ducklings. “When our friend gave us electricity and water, it was a joy… It wouldn’t have made me so happy to take a million euros of bills off the table that we didn’t have ‘elsewhere not because of the floods,’ he said. Moses as an example. “Having hot water at home made us smile from ear to ear. As if they had given us a gift at Christmas like when we were children,” compares Raquel.
“We don’t value such basic things as electricity and water until they run out,” he reflects. “We realize how bad people are when we have this very basic need,” said Raquel, who responded to some zodiac rescuers on Wednesday that there was no body in her house, in the industrial zone. from Albalat, about 400 meters away. meters from the Júcar river.
This Sunday evening, it is still raining very hard. “We are ‘shits’,” they say. Three hours ago, Raquel and Moisés received a red alert ‘text’ because of the rain and were heard over the public address system to lock themselves in the house, on the upper floors. The fear was such that Raquel went to take a couple who were helping them clean the entrance to Algemesí and wasted no time. He immediately returns in the car that a friend lent them because his is scrapped. The water gushed up to the trunk door, and she ended up on a ramp.
Water destroyed the car even though it was on a ramp
They also lost all the belongings, furniture and food they owned on the ground floor of their two-story house in Alcira. Precisely, having two floors saved them from an even more bitter disastrous experience. On Tuesday evening, the water reached a height of one meter and 41 centimeters in a short time and they were able to take everything they had saved up to the rooms on the upper floor.
Her two dogs took a while to do their business inside because they weren’t used to it. But the animals had no other way out, since until Thursday they could not go out into the street, taking advantage of the fact that the water height had dropped to fifty centimeters. “We were like on an island from which we couldn’t get out,” remembers Moisés, who was able to shower in his brother’s workshop on the third day.
With an old pump “from 50 years ago” that they lent them, they managed to evacuate nearly three million liters of water and mud for two days, according to Moisés’ calculation by multiplying the surface area of their land, approximately 2,250 square meters, by the height that the water reaches. “We didn’t understand the noise the pump made, but it made a lot of noise with the ten or fifteen centimeter mouthpiece it has…” he said gratefully. “But hey, we have to move forward.”
He suffers from serious back problems, although at least he hasn’t had a problem more serious than “pulling a rake”. They have a sludge of mud that will take several days to clear. “It’s going to be a long process,” says Raquel, moved by the help and encouragement received from many friends from different parts of Spain.
Furniture, personal effects and rotten food – “the house already smelled rotten”, she emphasizes – are at the door of the plot waiting for the town hall to collect them. They’re not the only ones waiting impatiently; There are also companies located in this polygon. But that’s the least we can do. “The important thing is that we can say it,” say Raquel and Moisés, saddened by the effects of DANA in Valencia and other regions of Spain.
