– When you arrive, don’t call me because I won’t have coverage. You’ll see that the gate is open, the water broke it, you go straight through and shout at me if I’m on the top floor.
Getting to Picanya, the municipality next to Paiporta, is the apocalypse. The roads are blocked from cars. In the end, all that remains is to park on the shoulder and cross the highway on foot. Endless lines of pilgrims with brooms dodge roundabouts and winding cars. From time to time, a soldier appears and shouts to get out of the way so that an emergency convoy can pass by. Most cars have something written on the windows: “SOS”, “Bilbao Fire Department”, “Getafe Police”. Upon entering the municipality everything is brown and mountainous. In Picanya it smells rotten. The children have been exiled, they have disappeared.
Vanesa Sanchis is on the upper floor of what was her home, in a beautiful residential area of duplexes and tree-lined walks next to the Poyo ravine, the deadliest, through which “we walked the dogs.” The ride no longer exists. He is a journalist for the Valencian public radio and television station, À Punt, from where he informed citizens in the days before the catastrophe, but where he has not been able to return since the fateful Tuesday, October 29.
Although Army trucks and crews of electricians or plumbers can already be seen on the streets, his life is many miles from being normal a week after the torrent that passed about 20 meters from his house took away everything, including the doors. of your home. “We can’t move, we can’t leave the house because it’s open.” They just replaced a bowler hat at the entrance, “a very nice guy who didn’t even charge me, told me to put a review on the Internet and that’s what he’s happy with.” At DANA ground zero there have been looting and robberies. “My husband finally told me, look, I take a knife and put it under the pillow, like the neighbor, we take it to the room just in case.” At the moment, there are not enough locksmiths or enough police.
A normal day in Vanesa’s life is very unusual. To begin with, their daughters are missing – Daniela, 11 years old, and Claudia, 7 years old –, whom they have had to temporarily send to the home of two friends from school, one with each family. “We didn’t want them to experience this.” When the ground floor, where the living room and kitchen were, flooded almost two meters, everyone went up to the first floor, where the bedrooms are. “We put them to bed dressed in case we had to flee from the water. “We were watching all night.” When they saw that the level had gone down, they had the doors blocked by the accumulated mud at the entrance. “I jumped out of the bathroom window and went to my sister’s house. There I charged my cell phone and was able to talk to my mother.”
The second jump he made was with his eldest daughter, he said goodbye and left her with a family of friends in Valencia, “and I haven’t seen her again.” The little girl continued the same path the next day, with her school backpack and a pair of clothes. This morning he asked Vanesa how her “babies” are. He doesn’t know it, but all the toys were taken this morning by the loading shovel that works on the street.
The day to day
They don’t set the alarm clock at Vanesa’s house, because there is no electricity. But it’s not necessary either. At seven it is almost daylight and almost all the neighbors come to the doors to clean the house, the objects, and retrieve cups and papers from the closets. Remove mud, remove mud, remove mud. For breakfast there is no coffee or toast. “I haven’t tried coffee in a week, plus I have celiac disease and there is nothing for me in the hot menus they prepare here. “I take a piece of bread, muffins that they brought me… and I clean up.” Sometimes the impossible, like the important documents and photos that have been hung on clothespins where there used to be clean clothes. This afternoon he will try to request the aid announced online, but they ask him for the name of the notary and the date for the house, “you think I remember!” He takes off his gloves. Two wounds appear from removing mud protected with tape.
The kitchen has remained in the chassis. There is no microwave, no washing machine, no cutlery drawer. There are cleaning products. A sad knife rests on an orphan bench that will have to be torn out. The water soaked everything, it even moved a partition a few centimeters. In order to live again they have to redo the downstairs. Chop walls, change the electricity, install an entire kitchen, sofa, table, TV, the glass doors that the water tore off… Everything again. “But look, we are.” For now they are going to do it themselves, with an architect friend, and we will see the aid. When they can close it, they will go to a small apartment that is left for them in Valencia. Like everything, “for now”.
They have some clothes, but with the mud they have to change every day. “The shower? Yesterday for the first time at my sister’s house, there is a thread here and it comes out cold?” Gas leaks have caused many municipalities to cut off the supply for fear of explosions like the one in Chiva, which left 19 volunteers intoxicated. Tap water, no matter how much or little it comes out, cannot be drunk. Vanesa does not drink it, but she finds out at this moment that it was prohibited in all the municipalities affected by the floods. “They warn about things on Instagram, the internet and Facebook, and here we have no electricity or coverage, how are we going to find out, if we have hardly even seen the news!” In fact, to know where to eat the first few days he had to ask a member of the UME. “He told me that at the institute they gave food and clothing. Then we go. My husband can eat something hot, I can eat something hot until they say it is for celiacs, nothing.”
Do the laundry
Today it’s time to do the laundry. To do that, I have to walk 20 minutes through mud to my car and drive to the town of Xirivella, where Vanesa’s mother lives and where life continues the same because the water didn’t reach there. It’s 6 kilometers. It took us half an hour on dusty and clogged roads. “This is how we live, lawless city.” There is coverage and Vanesa takes the opportunity to send and listen to all kinds of messages of help and encouragement and actions. Do, do, do. When she arrives and hugs her mother, “mom,” she cries. But he changes his gesture quickly and recovers. Solve, solve, solve. “Honey, I bought you clean sheets and tablecloths.” He is in charge of the children of Vanesa’s sister, whose house has also been flooded. “What tablecloths, Mom, if we eat sausage and bread in bed?” he laughs and hugs her.
Vanesa and her husband, who is a salesperson, have been left without a vehicle. They are trying to get some, like almost 100% of the inhabitants of the 65 municipalities that were buried by water. In Paiporta, its neighboring municipality, 95% of the vehicle fleet has disappeared, according to the mayor. Until the car arrives, it’s time to walk, wherever. If necessary, even Valencia. To go get food, to go get water, to get a locksmith, to go to the pharmacy. At the moment, there are no shuttle buses for the population of Picanya. They walk, wait or pull on family members or acquaintances. “Here you have to find a life for everything.” For now.
When night comes, the neighbors disappear from the doors and streets. Without light, there is nothing and it is all the smell of mud. Although a crew from Valladolid tries to solve it by pulling a cable to recover the line, for now they are still using autonomous lamps and candles. “The first night I had to spend my daughter’s first communion night, it makes me sad,” he says, but it had to be done, he is convinced. And what do you do when you can’t clean it? When nothing more can be done because it is night, Vanesa and her husband go upstairs, turn on two Decathlon lanterns and talk, or read, or eat something cold on the mattress. “I call the girls and we talk for a while, they are happy, they have school and so they are not experiencing this.” What is the first thing you would want to do? “See my daughters. “I want to get out of here and be able to do things like take a hot shower.”
Returning from Xirivella, another traffic jam, as in all of Horta Sud, which is experiencing an unprecedented mobility crisis because there is no other way to get around other than the bike, the legs or the cars, which clog everything up. His phone rings. His sister is upset because today, for the first time, they were able to enter the garage and they lost the cars and the memories. “Right now I’m going, come on, calm down, we’ll get this done,” he says energetically. “Leave me here, seriously, I’ll get there sooner by walking, I’ll get to the roundabout right away.” She has to stop by the high school to pick up hot food and some second-hand clothes to continue cleaning tomorrow. He has to go hug and help his sister. You have to do the paperwork online for aid today. Climb lightly towards Picanya, passing stranded and stoic cars. Nobody whistles. Vanesa, the journalist who appears on TV and does politics at the doors of Les Corts or the Palau de la Generalitat, disappears over the mound towards her new life, with mud-stained tights and borrowed wellies. It is the seventh day since the flood. “We have to move forward.” For now.
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