No child will hug the thousands of stuffed animals lying on the ground full of mud: they smell rotten. Around him, a dozen employees of the Famosa toy logistics factory are trying to save what they can for next Christmas in a devastated warehouse.
“The only thing we do these days is clean and save everything we can,” explained an employee this Wednesday, a large broom in hand. Behind her were thousands of stacked, half-broken boxes that had been floating in the water a week before. Inside you can see Doraemon, a Smurf, Hello Kitty, a character from Paw Patrol.
A week after the storm that devastated Valencia, the industrial zones in the affected areas have still not regained their activity. Only a few companies have been able to partially resume their activities. The rest of the employees are still working full time to repair the damage and don’t know when they will be able to get their jobs back.
“We’ve been removing the sludge and what’s left for a week,” lamented Mariluz Villar, an employee of a renewable energy company in the Riba-roja industrial zone, in Túria. Running water comes and goes. 20% of ships still have no electricity. That of Villar, for example, was only found on Monday. Almost none of them have Internet.
Visiting this industrial zone, located 20 kilometers from Valencia, is like entering a post-apocalyptic scenario: hundreds of trailers lying down and destroyed, blocked trucks full of branches and garbage, countless piled-up cars, puddles water and very deep holes… And the omnipresent brown mud which nowadays stains the entire affected area.
There are hardly any trucks driving, only army vehicles, ambulances and fire trucks are visible. Products from adjacent factories pile up on the sidewalks: toys, packets of napkins, cans of drinks. And furniture – refrigerators, tables, chairs in pallets – which can no longer be used.
20,000 people work here. About a thousand of them were stranded in the polygon on October 29, when the flood began to inundate the streets, and they had to spend the night at their work.
Some described staying perched on the roof of their ship all night. Others took refuge on the roofs of their trucks, praying that the strong current would not overturn them, amid the darkness and listening to calls for help. “It surprised us because it hardly rained here,” recalls Marcial Espinosa, an employee of a factory in the region.
Six of these workers died in the industrial zone the night of the flood, according to the official count. This Wednesday, however, there were still soldiers and UME agents looking for bodies in the cars and in the ravine that is a few meters from the complex.
“The first thing survivors asked us for was cell phone chargers to notify their families,” recalls Robert Raga, mayor of Riba-Roja de Túria. The municipality rescued them the next day by sending buses to the area to pick them up and take them to a school where they were given food and dry clothes.
Raga credits the “enormous work” that has been done in the past week to try to get the industrial zone back to normal, although he admits there is still a lot of work to be done to get the place up and running again .
“The first three days were devoted to clearing the roads of the industrial zones of trailers and branches,” explains the mayor. “Now we are trying to resume our activities so that we can normalize economic activity again.”
According to the Valencian Institute of Statistics, in the regions most affected by DANA there are 21,429 companies that employ 230,000 workers and 28,315 self-employed workers. The Generalitat Valenciana and the Chamber of Commerce estimate the damage caused to the industry at more than 10 billion euros.
The Federation of Commercial Estates admitted that “in most cases” the devastation inside warehouses is “high”. Riba-roja’s scenario confirmed this: after visiting more than twenty warehouses, there were practically none in good condition in the most affected areas.
While holding a lit pipe, Mariluz Villar, from the renewable energy company, regretted not having received any help from the administration: neither the UME, nor the army, nor any authority, she said , did not help her try to recover the activity. Volunteers don’t come here either.
“Only our children and a few friends came,” he lamented. “There are companies that have a lot of employees and have been able to progress, but others have done what we can and we still have days of work left.”