A woman, her mother and her two daughters aged two years and five months survived on a table while the house was flooded until a huge log blocked the water inlet.
Employees of 112 in Valencia had been reporting for days about a breakdown that prevented them from answering calls during DANA
Standing on a mattress on top of a table, Sharon Parra, her mother and her daughters – one two years old and the other five months old – watched on October 29 as the water level continued to rise inside their house. . Sharon grabbed her cell phone and called David, her husband, who was in Toledo working.
“Thank you for all my love, I love you very much, we love you with all our hearts,” she said through tears. “If we get out of here alive I hope to be able to hug you very tightly again.”
David Carvajal left everything he was doing, took his car and headed towards Cheste, 30 kilometers from València, a municipality where this Colombian family had rented a small house in the countryside that was just below a ravine.
“We were very happy there, we had chickens, dogs, ducks… And it seemed like a great place to raise our daughters,” they both recalled last Friday in Alboraia, in an apartment facing the sea that a social entity gave them for a week. .
David attends the interview wearing women’s pajama pants. Along with the shirt he is wearing, it is the only thing he has. The clothes Sharon is wearing aren’t hers either. They both lost everything in their little house in Cheste, which has been completely devastated after the storm.
“We have lost everything: the house, the clothes, the memories… We only had time to grab the papers and the clothes and a few of the girls’ toys,” they explain while their eldest daughter, Zofie, flits around the house.
A tree blocked the water inlet
Sharon will never forget the day the water swept away her entire house. At eight in the morning on October 29, the first leaks began to appear in his home. At 10:30 a.m. he left home and saw that the dirt track in front of his home had turned into a river.
“That’s when I got scared and I called 112, I told them that I was with two very little girls and I was worried, I asked them if someone could come rescue us,” she recalls. “They told me that nothing was happening, that if the water got inside the home I would call them again.”
Sharon did not know it, but at that moment the emergency service was already beginning to overflow, as several 112 employees explained to elDiario.es. “The waiting time was increasing and the calls were piling up,” these sources say.
Sharon shows the pine tree that entered her home and blocked the water from entering.
This woman and her mother, Alba, prepared some bags in case they had to leave the house quickly. In them they put their most important papers and clothes for the girls. Around 12 noon, however, the rain stopped and they calmed down. They even took Zofie outside to splash in the water.
Everything went wrong again around 5:30 p.m. After half an hour of raining again, the water reached his knees inside the home. All the dirty water from the septic tank started coming out of the toilet. Sharon started trying to hit the chimney to break it and try to escape through there. “I was desperate,” she remembers. “The only thing I did was ask for them to get us out of there.”
A deafening noise left them paralyzed. A large pine tree had broken one of the windows and partially entered the house. At that time they did not know it, but that tree blocked the window and blocked the entry of water into the home.
While all this was happening, David, who works as a security system integrator, was trying to return from Toledo in a hurry. Around 10:00 p.m. he stopped having contact with his wife and daughters and assumed the worst.
“I started telling my classmates what belongings of mine each one of them was going to be able to keep,” he recalled through tears last Friday. “I assumed they had all died and I was going to take my own life.”
After spending the night on the table, Sharon saw that dawn was breaking and the rain had stopped. Everything was destroyed: the pipes, the chicken coop, the garden, the rooms… They were alive, but the house had been left uninhabitable, full of fecal water from the septic tank.
Seeing Sharon, her mother and the girls inside the home through a window, the neighbors couldn’t believe it. “We assumed you were dead,” they told them when they arrived. They took shovels and began to remove the mud to unlock the door so they could leave the house.
“We were born again,” explained this woman and her mother. “When we got out we couldn’t stop crying.” They took refuge in their neighbor’s house until David arrived and they all merged into an endless hug.
Climbing on a mattress on top of the table, the water almost drowned this Colombian family.
The search for a home
After surviving the flood, without even clothes to wear, this family began the search for a new home. But, according to his story, in the majority of apartments they called, they responded with refusals when they found out that they were Colombians.
“These days we have seen the best side of Spain, which has been the solidarity of many people,” says David, who has been taking medication for a few days after suffering an anxiety crisis. “But we have also seen the worst, the racism that is still present in some parts of society.”
The family started a campaign on networks to find an address that generated a wave of solidarity. Provisionally, a social entity, called Unleash your Potential, has managed to find them a temporary apartment facing the sea in Alboraia, on the outskirts of Valencia. That provisional solution, however, runs out this Wednesday.
“When we came here and saw the sea we couldn’t believe it, but now we have to find a solution,” both explained from home. “We have money to pay rent that is not very expensive,” they emphasize.
After being born again, Sharon, David, Alba, Zofie and Zoe want to start over. “After what has happened, everything seems little to us,” they concluded. “We are willing to fight to get ahead.”
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