There isn’t a place on my body where I haven’t found mud every night for five days. From my toenails to the hairs on my head, I have been dealing with mud since a flood forever transformed my adopted town, Aldaia, and all of our lives. Since we had to take brushes, shovels and buckets to bail out and clear. Like all my neighbors and the number of people who come to help us, I am filled with mud, a substance as viscous as the rage that invades us.
While the kings arrived in Paiporta with a large entourage, a farmer from La Rioja arrived in my town yesterday. He got on his tractor, left his field work halfway and decided to go wherever he could be needed. Thanks to its extractor pump we have been able to begin emptying one of the town’s flooded garages which, after five days, still had water from floor to ceiling.
Now that I have stopped working due to the orange alert, I am filled with gratitude for the wave of citizen solidarity and anger that the institutional response is being so slow. The memory of the lack of warnings by the Generalitat Valenciana despite having reliable data that warned of an extreme risk comes to my mind and makes me angry.
This indignation extends to verifying a too timid response by the institutions to the catastrophe. Until today, November 3, sufficient heavy machinery has not arrived in Aldaia to be able to make progress in cleaning the streets and removing the mountains of furniture, cars, appliances and memories that the water has washed away and the mud has destroyed.
We need all the machinery and specialized knowledge possible to remove what accumulates in our streets, we need the supply of food and basic necessities to be restored and we need the State to dimension the current emergency and help will also be needed later. The processes of expert assessment and payment of amounts through the insurance consortium are very slow and scarce. If we want to return to normality as soon as possible, we need to provide human and material resources as soon as possible. Houses, businesses and lives must be rebuilt. And that cannot wait even a second or be delegated to the voluntarism of those who want to add their grain of sand. Furthermore, we run the serious risk of conditioning the level of response to the economic capacity of those affected. Leaving the ability to remake lives in the hands of the market response would be even more catastrophic.
The lack of vision and responsibility of the institutions, of all of them, has led to real catastrophes. Not only because of the current scenario but because the repeated warnings about the effects of climate change, about the consequences of city and consumption models designed for car-dependent mobility and huge quantities of fossil fuels and energy have been ignored time after time. The allegations of groups of scientists to each infrastructure and urban development in flood zones or that destroyed the natural protection environments themselves have been crushed in the same way that the water crushed houses on the night of October 29, the consequences of climate change have arrived for stay. We are faced with the choice between mitigating the worst effects and adapting our environments, cities, consumption models and cities, or regretting it again and having anger and exhaustion begin to become more and more frequent.
The mud is going to stay inside us and so is the awareness that this must change too.
#mud #top #rage
