The image of the destruction at DANA’s ‘ground zero’ on the outskirts of Valencia remains immense but not static. If in the first days it was the volunteers who came on foot who began to change it, bringing all kinds of help, now it is the heavy machinery of the Army and the UME that definitively modifies the landscape. A work that is advancing, more than a week after the floods, with a sustained pace but a still very chaotic environment where soldiers, security force agents and volunteers from all over Spain work.
“You can’t go from here. The street is closed so we can work with the machines,” repeats one of the 7,800 soldiers already deployed. “We arrived in Catarroja on Sunday. We now have this area assigned. We really appreciate all the volunteer help because it has been greatly needed, but now we have to organize everything better to avoid getting in each other’s way. Because here what is needed is for heavy machines to work,” he comments, at an intersection where trucks and cranes work, in the Barracas area, the oldest in the town.
A few streets away Rafa, who lives in the nearby municipality of Silla, continues to help the parents of his partner, Raquel. Rafa saw how they took out the bodies of three victims in a car that had gotten stuck in the roundabout in front of the commuter station, not far from his in-laws’ house: “The wall of the train tracks acted like a funnel The neighbor of a house on the next street had to knock down the partition of his house to enter the stairs and go up to the first floor. “That’s how he was saved.”
It’s mid-morning and the volunteers continue arriving with shovels and rakes, boxes of cleaning products… They have to snake their way around to avoid the streets that are occupied by army machines. They are the other army, the one that arrived when state aid had not yet arrived.
Las Barracas is an area of one- or two-story houses, some more than a hundred years old, with doorways adorned with colorful tiles that have withstood the onslaught of water. From one of these houses, Mari Carmen appears. “This is the house where my husband was born, it belonged to his great-grandmother. And look, not one of these has jumped,” he says, looking inward, at the tiles that adorn the walls. “But we have had to throw everything away, refrigerator, washing machine, oven. Thank goodness I had put the writings on a tall piece of furniture… When people call me and ask me ‘how are you’, sometimes I answer that it’s good, I’ve just been on a trip to Venice. And they are glad that I still feel like making jokes. But what are we going to do? “We are alive,” she adds, clinging to the bars of the solid wooden portal, while her eyes water. She is 77 years old, “78 next month,” she says, after thanking a friend who has come to deliver oranges brought by volunteers. A volunteer is also the nurse who, a few meters away, is treating a neighbor’s feet destroyed by hours spent soaking in the mud.
“They have helped a lot here the first few days, they were the ones who brought us food, ordinary people who came walking,” says a neighbor, leaning out of the window while a tractor with a shovel works below to remove it from the road little by little. What a week ago were the furniture, the books, the clothes, the beds, the memories of the inhabitants and now are a brown mass of garbage.
An Easter balcony hanging from a window, which a neighbor has turned over to write: “Thank you very much to all the people for coming to help. We are very grateful. You are the hell, Spaniards.” It is not the only message that is read. There is a great feeling of recognition from the population towards the volunteers who appeared in the streets, large roads and alleys of Paiporta, Alfafar, Catarroja, Benetúser when the mud had turned them into a large anthill, when there was neither light nor water here. , nor food, when the anguish of those who missed each other cut off words and breath.
Many continue to travel from various parts of Spain, willing to spend a few days of rest or vacation in order to “lend a hand where they can.” And if in the early days this was giving food and drink to those who no longer had anything, now it is wielding a shovel to help remove mud from the sidewalks. Many discover it when they have already arrived with a car full of food or various products and find that they have nowhere to unload or distribute them. “We’ve been working on it for a day and a half. “First they sent us to the City of Arts and they told us that they were already full, then to the Mestalla and the same,” said two boys standing with their car in the Catarroja industrial estate this Wednesday.
“The reality is that practically every street you see daily progress. There have been days when, from when we arrived to when we left at night, it seemed like something else and that’s how much progress is made. But of course, now everything is gone, the water is already being removed from the garages, but there is an entire city of garbage left that must be removed with heavy machinery,” says David Lladó, from the NGO Open Arms, which has been in the area for a week. ‘ground zero’ and this Wednesday he helped, with his eight volunteers, to bail out water from some garages in Benetúser. “There is a bit of what I call the ‘Ukraine effect’ happening here, since everyone is super supportive. But if the first two days you heard ‘we don’t have water’, now we have been in places where there are help stations everywhere. You see in the morning that there are eight pallets of water jugs and you leave at night and they are still there,” adds Lladó. “There is a problem of coordination but also of communication.”
“On the sidewalk, please, on the sidewalk!”, warns an agent at an intersection on Camí Nou Avenue, which runs through Benetúser, when a group of young people, carrying shovels, cross the road where a tractor is waiting to be able to pass. Many have had to come on foot from the Catarroja industrial estate or even further away, due to the restrictions on private vehicle traffic that were stricter this Wednesday in the areas affected by the flood.
“There is a feeling of chaos, there is no point of organization, someone to say ‘here goes the garbage, here goes this…’. Suddenly someone appears with a truck, with a shovel, with the excavator and between them they see what the street is like and they pull…”, comments an Ertzaintza agent, who has arrived here with a group of companions, in his days of rest. He says that they have been self-organizing with other volunteers from the security forces present in the area. “Lack of control”, “Disorganization” is what other agents and firefighters who arrived voluntarily also repeat.
The movement of vehicles towards ‘ground zero’ has caused traffic jams and traffic jams, especially in the morning on the streets of Valencia. A collapse that on Tuesday formed queues that lasted for hours, as unauthorized private vehicles were cut off from access, with a chaotic coming and going of heavy machines, army vehicles, cars and vans.
“The problem is not the people. The problem is that everything is disorganized. The entrances and exits are not very coordinated and they leave and enter at the same time through the same routes. An organization could have been carried out in quadrants so that the army could work in one place, leaving the volunteers in a second area to move from area to area. And now there are blockages that prevent the work of the UME, the army or the firefighters,” commented Antonio Caballero on Tuesday, late in the afternoon, at the door of the building where he lives in Paiporta, where in several areas The electric current had finally returned.
Meanwhile, on the street, an EMU member with a loudspeaker repeated that the passage should be speeded up as much as possible. Caballero lives on Maestro Palau street, a few meters from the roundabout where on Sunday the arrival of the king, the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, unleashed a protest with screams and throwing mud and objects . Anger is a feeling that has not disappeared from the streets, but the progress of the cleaning work acts as a balm, after a wait of days that warmed spirits already overwhelmed by helplessness and pain.
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