Javier Tarín remembered Sandra Castillo as a girl in those same streets of Chiva in the area called Rincón and which at that time were devastated by DANA. He knew that their respective grandparents were close friends, and so were their parents. They had grown up close to each other, they had played together sheltered by that sense of community that exists among some families in the towns, that bond that is inherited between generations by which one neighbor is linked to another long before being born. That friendship was supposed to remain forever like so-and-so’s house that is no longer there, like the bridges that are no longer there and in general like all the things that we believed were eternal without being so. But a few months ago, Javier and Sandra – he, a construction businessman and councilor for Activa Chiva and she, an architect and PP councilor – had been distancing themselves “due to political issues and the issue of the City Council.” In the last municipal elections, Javier’s party, Activa Chiva, and Sandra’s PP had formed a government coalition that broke up last May, and that disagreement between parties created something between them that did not amount to an enmity, but it could look like him. Or that’s how he felt, until the downpour fell on October 29 and the Poyo ravine cut the town in half, like a chainsaw of water, stones, death and logs. Then, they met again. Javier suddenly found himself with his family cleaning Sandra’s house and thought about what had separated them, that mistrust that was no longer there. “At that moment, we recovered our selves,” he remembers, and tells how they fought together against the disaster. This is the story of how a group of councilors from different parties worked together for their town, oblivious to the political brawl that was spreading across the country. Brass bands and costumes “The water erased our colors,” recalls Javier Tarín in the dining room of the El Canario restaurant. The reporter remembers that same space a few months before, during the Torico de Chiva festivities. At that same lunchtime there was brass band music, groups of friends, a guy dressed as Tina Turner, a deejay, and some kids with colorful dungarees who had stuck giant photos of Enrique Ponce on their backs before doing the parade. The members of a group that survived on hunting called themselves The Cazalleros of the Zodiac. Nothing remains of all that joy and now, it’s all workers rebuilding the town with their uniforms, their angular hands, their three-day beard, their dirty shoes and that look of a thousand yards of mud. An unlikely group of councilors from different parties has gathered at a table who remember how they put aside the political struggle in a working group in which, among others, Sandra Castillo, an architect, councilor for Urban Planning of the PP, Ernesto Navarro, appeared. cultural manager and socialist councilor, Gonzalo Lacalle, lawyer and councilor of Activa Chiva and the construction businessman Javier Tarín and Héctor Tarín, waiter and councilor of Compromis. Brotherhood or ‘germanor’ First, the downpour came, then the flood and, finally, silence and confusion. Javier went to the Bechinos neighborhood with a flashlight and everything was screams and lost people. The water had washed away entire houses. “It looked like the Apocalypse.” There was no coverage in the town, so they couldn’t communicate, but they found each other in every way, physically and morally, in some way, in a connection that was almost wordless. “We looked at each other and we already knew what we were thinking: that we had to help, that we had to put ourselves at the other’s command,” he explains. That everything was over, or changed. «I had that same feeling. I saw myself working alongside someone from Vox, being from Compromis, imagine. The flood has made it ‘populous’ and has given rise to what we call here ‘germanor’, a brotherhood. On the televisions that no one could turn on there in the mud, reproaches and daggers flew between the parties in an unfathomable battle in which they did not participate. “The wars between PP and PSOE and the others remained in the background,” recalls Ernesto Navarro, PSPV councilor. “The four from the PP were there with us.” “It seemed like the Apocalypse” First, the downpour came, then the flood and, finally, silence and confusion. It was all screams and lost people. From her opponent, Urban Planning Councilor Sandra Castillo, they highlight that she had a very important job when it came to recognizing the state of the houses, many of which had to be demolished or collapsed later, like the historic building. of the Mutua, today partly converted into a pile of rubble over the ravine. “We work side by side, without colors,” she explains. Gonzalo Lacalle, councilor of Chiva Activa, who was in charge of the polygon’s collection point, acknowledges that “in the midst of the horror, very beautiful things were experienced. There were moments of enormous complicity between us that made it possible for things to work. The UME commanders acknowledged that the feat of having the town clean five days after the flood was “a real miracle” to which all the neighbors from the age of twelve contributed. “I remember seeing the kids on the street and I get emotional,” confesses Héctor Tarín. The People’s Army They spent three days “alone,” according to Gonzalo. The first army was the people themselves. “People didn’t ask questions: they started helping,” explains Ernesto Navarro. In the house of ‘Las Provincias’ journalist Héctor Esteban, which they would later have to shore up “with the help of colleagues,” dozens of people entered and “no one asked if the roof could fall.” Stories of solidarity on the edge of tragedy resonate everywhere. Sometimes, the coin fell heads – they pulled him out by the chest with the television cables a second before the house collapsed – and other times, tails, as when the bodies appeared in the cars or tangled in the cow fence. Fifteen kilometers later the volunteers appeared as if they had come from nowhere and were led by Javier Tarín like an army without stripes or uniforms. The A3 was closed near Buñol and there was no human way to get there, but residents of other towns managed. One of them arrived from Valencia making his way with an excavator. Those from Cheste brought their tractors. Others came wading through the water fifteen kilometers from Godelleta and the buses suddenly brought 1,500 volunteers from Valencia who they were unable to accommodate. From Lodosa (Navarra) the ranchers came with the trucks in which they brought the bulls full of belongings, and the bullfighting group prepared food in the corrals for thousands of people without a trace of whites or blues. The lesson was them. “Hopefully we can continue like this,” concludes Sandra Castillo. After consulting with the mayor’s office, the councilor ruled out posing in the photo with her co-workers in the tragedy. “We don’t want to mix floods and politics,” Mayor Amparo Fort excuses herself in response to ABC’s request to participate in the report.
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