«Els xiquets, els xiquets! “The water has taken them away!”: DANA tore the children from their parents’ arms

A desperate cry that in the midst of chaos, lost in time and distance, “we were not able to know where it came from,” the neighbors told ABC. “It’s the new one.” According to their story, the couple had arrived at the development a little over a year ago. A young couple, with two children, ages five and three. “We saw them playing soccer in the street.” It had to be them.

From there the story plunges into the confusion in which thousands of Valencians from L’Horta Sud, when they were trapped by the flooding of the Turia to the north, the Magro river to the south and, in the middle, the Poyo ravine. The rain, strong winds and occasional tornadoes put telephone communications in check and turned off the lights in much of the region. With no lights and barely any internet connection, whoever still had an old battery-powered transistor was the king of information.

Thus, the neighbors say that the father was alone with the two children at home, “his wife was working in Valencia and could not return,” Paquita explains to ABC. “They were protected there, but the flood demolished the house, the father ran out with them in his arms and although he tried to grab them, the force of the water tore the children from his arms,” ​​the woman narrates between sobs with such rawness and clarity. which resembles the classic painting by Muñoz Degrain, who in 1912 portrayed a mother who, in the middle of the Valencian orchard, tried to save her son from the fury of the runaway, dirty and turbulent waters, the same as yesterday. ‘Mother’s love’ the painter titled that work.

Little does Paquita, and the rest of the neighbors, know about the children’s fate. Only this morning the demolished house was no longer there, nor was the father. Not even the children. They are probably part of the more than ninety victims that the Generalitat Valenciana has recognized, to whom it is still almost impossible to put a name and face. Like another marriage in the urbanization. «They were already older, and they did not have a first floor to take refuge. “The house filled with water and they even entered by diving, but they couldn’t get them out and the couple died.”

Paquita and her husband were saved thanks to the fact that their ‘house’ has a first floor and they were able to take refuge there when the ravine flooded. “It was just right for us, the water was touching our feet,” he explains to us without nerves and an incipient sob interrupting that frankness and clarity as he narrates that night. «I have been left without a house, everything has been destroyed, furniture, refrigerator, TV, everything. It feels like starting over, but I don’t know if, at almost seventy years old, I don’t know if I’m going to have the strength,” he describes his situation. “Although all that doesn’t matter, compared to the poor people who have lost their lives,” he adds.

“It was horrible,” adds another neighbor, who was also able to save herself and her husband thanks to the height of their house. «When it started to grow into the water we only heard: help! “Help! From people who were climbing the streetlights and trees resisting the force of the water,” he explains. “It was total helplessness, because we couldn’t do anything,” he adds. «Although the worst was when we stopped listening to them, because we knew that no one had been able to help them. That silence destroyed me,” the woman confesses. “Since then I have those screams in my head, although I no longer know if the screams were worse or when people stopped screaming,” she concludes regretfully.