“One more email and I’m done,” her partner tells Jessica on the afternoon of what seems like a random Tuesday at the end of October. “Okay, I’ll take advantage and make a call,” she answers. They know that there are orange alerts for rain, but nothing out of the ordinary in an area that usually floods every year. Valencia is a land of cold water: in the face of these events, residents are used to walling up the doors to prevent water from seeping underneath. Even administrations in extreme cases issue warnings so that no one goes out into the streets, schools are closed and transport lines stop. Not this time, so people are going about their usual lives on the street, leaving work, going shopping. And that’s why Jessica and her partner decide to go run some errands. It’s just that work is slowing them down.
In that extra time, they begin to hear from their house that the murmur of their street, a main avenue in Catarroja, begins to become more intense and strange. They do not hear rain, because it is not raining there. There are blows, then alarms, followed by screams. They look out the window and see a foot of water flowing on the pavement. It rises to the subway in a matter of ten minutes and begins to drag vehicles, street furniture, and people. Normal Tuesday turns into the Tuesday that has changed their lives forever.
«Now I see it raining through the window and it makes me anxious, I want to run away and hide. I know that the trauma is going to last me for life,” Jessica Rojas tells ABC by phone now from Puerto de Sagunto, the place where a friend has welcomed the couple. They are about 30 kilometers from ground zero of the catastrophe created by DANA that devastated Valencia and several municipalities in Castilla-La Mancha, but she and her partner closely follow the situation in their town. He explains that his head exploded when he left Catarroja on Sunday (“we couldn’t continue living like ‘Rambo’, without realizing that we were also victims despite having had no human losses,” he says), just five kilometers from everything. That disaster in which more than two hundred people died, the world continued. «We are very close, but the situations are totally different, with establishments open normally, people on the streets, people without mud on their clothes. That is very shocking for someone who has been immersed in that,” he says.
At this moment, with somewhat more stable coverage, it serves as a link between the neighbors who remain there and that outside world that tries to continue without being able to get an idea of what has happened there. Right now he is ‘fighting’ with his telephone company to ensure internet connection in his apartment in Catarroja, which he has offered as a rest base to a group of police officers who have arrived from the Balearic Islands to help.
Days without being able to flush the toilet
Luckily, they only have to regret material losses (their motorcycle was found muddy and unusable days after the flood, although the car has not yet been found) and their apartment, being on the second floor, has not been flooded. However, that does not mean that the tragedy has not also hit them completely: they were left without electricity and light, so their house became another ground zero, all covered in mud after returning from helping people. , without being able to clean, without even the possibility of something as basic as emptying the toilet, which inevitably filled up day after day. And that wasn’t the worst of the situation. «At night I have nightmares about a metallic noise that could be heard during the flood while my neighbors across the street were trying to save a person with a ladder. “It’s terrifying.”
The sound, something similar to a metal hinge or a macabre seesaw that could perfectly be part of a horror movie, is recorded in one of the videos that Jessica made to document the horror (and included in the compilation video that accompanies this article) . «It’s the one on the bass! “Shall we call the police?” she is heard saying. “What are the police going to do?” his partner replies. “I don’t know, a rescue helicopter, or something,” says Jessica without imagining at that moment that they had become the protagonists of their own scary series.
At 4:30 in the morning, after seeing Dantesque images and even rescuing the fruit shop assistants from drowning under their house, they went down to the street taking advantage of the fact that the level of the flood had already gone down. “It was like ‘The Walking Dead’: people staring into the streets, limping, probably trying to return to their homes after having taken shelter in someone else’s,” he says. Piles of cars of various heights, mud everywhere, rubble… and jewelry stores and establishments already subject to the first looting. «We heard how the criminals warned each other. My partner and I took turns in the living room to keep watch, because all the doors on the ground floor had been carried away by the current. “Dusking at six in the afternoon… the nights became long.”
Routine: survive
In the morning, his routine became surviving. “The goal was to get drinking water, clean mud, help and document what was happening.” It so happens that Jessica is a photographer, although she usually captures spectacular images of the Moon and the stars. This time, the sequences were spectacular, but for different reasons. «The other day I noticed how beautiful the Sun was behind the haze and I thought ‘how good this photo would be’, as if I didn’t dedicate myself to that… I realized that I had lost the conception of time, of space and that, suddenly, I didn’t know who he was.
For five days he has been publishing day-to-day videos through his social networks – when the intermittent connection allowed it -, in which he has thousands of followers. There he has shared everything from the people’s regret for the lack of help – “There were places in Catarroja where no one arrived until the fourth day,” he says – to stories with a thread of hope, like the cats in a colony that survived. up in the trees, spreading the word to find a home for them while everything tries to return to a normality that will foreseeably take time to arrive. “But no matter how much content is uploaded, no one who hasn’t been there knows the magnitude of what is really happening.”
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