“If you come to clean the mud, please follow me because humanitarian aid has not yet reached my street!” Dressed in a red shirt and carrying two shovels on his shoulder, Moses Pitarch He addresses a group of young volunteers among the mountains of broken-down cars that pile up one on top of the other on the train track that separates Benetússer from Alfafar. From the tunnel that connects both municipalities to the south of the metropolitan area of Valencia, firefighters finished this Saturday removing the vehicles that were trapped when the DANA flooded it on Tuesday with a fury never seen here.
Honoring his biblical name, Moisés also opens the waters of Alfafar to remove the mud left by the flood and so that much-needed humanitarian aid arrives. “The storm surprised me at my job, at the Prosegur headquarters, and I had to stay there all night because my colleagues couldn’t arrive,” says this sworn security guard born 47 years ago in Valencia. That tragic night, his wife, the Venezuelan Yaselia Lopezwas warning him by phone that the water did not stop rising and had become a river that was sweeping away the cars. Among them, his, which ended up more than a hundred meters away in a school yard.
“When I returned the next morning, I had to do it barefoot and I couldn’t believe the devastation I saw,” recalls Moisés, still in shock. But, without letting the shock paralyze him, he began to clean his street. An example that at first no one followed, probably due to helplessness in the face of the magnitude of the disaster, but that later spread to other neighbors.
Between residents of the neighborhood and volunteers coming from other parts of Valencia, a human chain removes from the ground floors of the blocks, which the water covered more than one meter, furniture, appliances, mattresses and all kinds of destroyed and muddy belongings. They are the remains of lives that were shipwrecked in the midst of the worst ‘cold drop’ in recent decades, the largest natural disaster that has hit Spain and whose death toll may still rise further due to the many missing people.
«Since Wednesday I have been cleaning the mud so that the neighbors can walk. But, now that the volunteers are arriving en masse, I dedicate myself to going house to house to ask the elderly and sick people what they need, to inform the authorities so that the humanitarian aid reaches where it needs to go,” explains Moisés in the corner of your street. No matter where you look, the panorama is apocalyptic. On one side, dozens of people push the mud into the sewers with shovels and boards. On the other, three firefighters climb a pile of cars and break their windows looking for bodies inside, since it is believed that a missing young man could be in one of them.
«My husband found this Virgin in a sewer while sweeping the street. We have cleaned it and we are going to keep it because, thank God, we are still alive and we know that he protects us,” says Moisés’ wife, Yaselia López, holding back tears. Giving a good example of their compassion and humanity, the couple welcomed their neighbors from the ground floor into their house, which was flooded and they had to take refuge on the upper floors.
On the walls of his living room, eight mentions from the Civil Guard certify Moisés’ spirit of solidarity and vocation for service. With a smile that comes from the heart, he doesn’t even get angry when the volunteers vigorously sweeping the mud from a doorway splash it all over his face. Even so, with stains on his face, he goes floor by floor asking what medicines a lame neighbor and an elderly couple need. Once on the street, he addresses the elderly people who look out from their balconies to see what they need. In most cases, these are medicines, which Moisés writes down in a notebook, since he has already opened an aid distribution center in the neighborhood. From there, the younger neighbors also bring food for the older ones, who stay at home because the streets are still muddy.
In addition to the distribution of food, a team of firefighters from Malaga has arrived in the neighborhood, joining the efforts to bail out water and mud. «Suddenly we saw that there were people screaming, around seven thirty, water, water, water began to come… We tried to hold it back with towels, but it began to enter from the sides in a brutal way. When it was eight o’clock and we wanted to leave the house, the water reached our waists,” he says. Sandra Bataller. Together with her husband, Pedro Ortegathey took shelter with the neighbors on the first floor because, “if it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t tell about it.”
Both insist that “no one had warned us. If they had, we could have prepared better and saved some things. But, when we received the Civil Protection alert on our cell phones after eight in the afternoon, the water was already reaching us here,” Sandra criticizes, putting her hand on her waist. Despite Valencia’s past of floods, they never thought that “something like this could happen” and, still without believing it, they lament that “our whole life has gone out the window.”
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