How I saw my old house fall apart due to DANA

Nervous in my room in a municipality in the Basque Country, where I work as a delegate of ABC, I couldn’t stop looking at the photo that Guille had sent to the WhatsApp group, with a “brown and black” current that reached above his knee while waiting for his sister at the door of his home. “How crazy is this… My grandmother almost doesn’t tell it, her house is destroyed.” “Guys, I’m fine, if anyone needs help, let them know.” For them, a few hours of true survival had begun. Jaume saved his father from dying trapped in his garage. The television networks had stopped broadcasting after dawn. All the calls were for help and the Apunt journalists worked hard to amplify them, in the hope that someone could come to the aid of these people.

The next day I had a interview with a former BBVA executive. I was like an automaton. In my head I only saw and heard the screams of my people, my neighbors, my engulfed town. I had just seen my land disappear and I didn’t know if many of my friends could be buried under a mass of carsdebris and mud, which in this area of ​​the Lower Ribera only stopped when reaching the rice fields. Fortunately they did not have water, days before starting the ‘perelloná’ (moment of the crop cycle in which they are flooded). Otherwise, perhaps the radius of the tsunami, which devastated dozens and dozens of municipalities in Valencia, would have reached other towns such as Saler, where my father, two nephews, their mother and hundreds of citizens currently reside in low houses and campsites.

I booked a plane ticket—without being able to imagine the magnitude of what had happened four hundred miles away—and, before heading to the airport, I bought a used shovel, masks, gloves, instant soup sachets, water bottles and I put it all in a backpack along with some old clothes. In another, I kept my computer and work cell phone. I took off at Loiu airport and landed in Manises. I hesitantly got into a taxi and told the driver to drive as close to my house as he could. The taxi driver told me that he was looking forward to not having to take anyone there. It was my fucking town.

I got off in the San Marcelino neighborhood, where I played soccer seven years ago. A memory erased by the real image before my glassy eyes. I walked among streams of people who seemed to be on a pilgrimage. The mud sucked my sneakers and I took a short detour to reach my portalbecause at the nearest end of the street there was a mountain of cars packed together. I avoided iron, broken furniture, branches and glass. Everything was a brown blanket of death. My memory buried in the mud. I left my things at home, where I briefly discussed the seriousness of the catastrophe with Sergio, who has been renting there since I moved to Madrid to study. Then I went down to Iván’s house, in the second, with whom I had gone to school since I was three years old and who two nights ago had just saved a woman by breaking a garage blind with her hands.

He was angry about what had just happened, but he was aware that there was no other option but to move on. The next day Andrea, his girlfriend, needed help cleaning one of her ground floors and we went there. It was the first time I saw the Legion remove debris and members of the GEAS (Special Underwater Group of the Civil Guard) enter the basements in search of bodies, dead or alive. When I finished I went to see How were some friends of the gang, who had seen their homes destroyed?. That day Sion blew out the candles smiling in front of her.

We said goodbye and I went for a walk with Joe, who had been missing from the networks hours and hours after the tragedy and who was already working at what was our school, Blasco Ibáñez, transformed into a logistics center for collection and shipping of supplies (its operation later surprised even Army officers). “When will everything go back to normal?” he asked me. I didn’t know what to answer. We were walking along Camí Nou, the main avenue that connects Benetúser with Massanassa, a town that has taken longer to receive help than mine, as has Catarroja. We arrived at Nacho’s house. His garage door ended up burst from the blows and he had been cleaning the basement of his street for days. After a few minutes of chatting, and eating a mackerel sandwich that Joe made me and that I couldn’t swallow, a dark and tired man appeared.

—Can you help me?

-Yeah.

Paralyzed by panic

We entered his house, which was two stories high. In the one below there were two inches of dense brown paste and the man insisted on keeping the furniture (something that Caso’s sister intended at another time, when she saw his works of art full of mold)which were still in place, with all the photos on them. We received the help of three other kids and two girls our age. Some of us filled the buckets with what we had and the rest emptied them on the street, which looked like a skating rink of the same color, softened and puddled. I wondered why that person didn’t cooperate, while an older woman, who must have been her mother, kept offering us more containers from the upper floor. Then I realized that I was paralyzed by panic.

Since then I joined Blasco Ibáñez for several days. I slept little and the only dream I remember is a nightmare. I would go to bed late with my head spinning, retching thinking about everything around me, and I would wake up early to go back to handing out medical supplies. I had coffee and several cigarettes for breakfast and took the bike that I left at the door, along with some apreski boots so as not to stain the inside of my home. I began to think that I should take advantage of pedaling trips to report and document what I saw, being able to perceive the reality of a larger area. First I contacted Pau and my former youth coach, Óscar, both from Paiporta. They live in an area where they have dozens of dead found among mountains of stinking garbage. Then with Loreto, whom I met on one of the expeditions to Catarroja and who asked me for help for her mother. People whom I had known personally and who had also experienced that situation could not lie to me and I decided to include what they told me in the brief chronicles that I have been publishing.

I also sent all the points of interest I saw to the WhatsApp group shared with my ABC colleagues directly involved in the coverage. I still cannot understand how the Valencian José Ramón Navarro-Pareja managed to arrive by car from the capital and then walked alone one day after the disaster. To this day he is still in his land. I saw Pablo Lodeiro, Angie Calero, Helena Cortés and Jaime García those days trying to console someone who had just lost everything on the sidewalks of my town. Lodeiro told me that the scene around us seemed like a nightmare and García gave me the idea that later allowed me to get out of it. My desperation only grew. Every time I set foot in the mud I entered the chapter of a horror story. It wasn’t until I typed the first sentences of this text (the most difficult and also the most sincere and simple that I have ever written) that the bubble broke, I was able to come out of the shock and I began to cathartically cry without consolation.

It will rain again and be fertile

Since then I have recovered my hunger and sleep, half-watched ‘Men in Black I’, listened to Vetusta Morla’s June 23 and understood that Valencia is a fertile land, and that every stroke of brotherhood will make it regain its spark and color. Two components typical of happy, enthusiastic and daring people like those from Valencia who will soon jump into the water, cultivate the land and jump over fire without fear.

His heroic reaction in the midst of chaos and destruction also demonstrates that human beings organize and learn to survive. What else is the explanation why the tragedy that Valencia is still going through has left the death toll a miracle? It is the only logical answer that occurs to me when I think about how many fled to the heights when the current began to accelerate under their feet and how many of us began to wear masks and gloves, when our old neighborhoods became unhealthy and unsafe areas. None of these measures were implemented at the direction of the State. Something that would have allowed us to reduce the number of fatalities and minutes of suffering for entire communities.

Beyond the lack of foresight and political inaction, I believe that the excess of bureaucracy has caused errors in decision-making to chain themselves up. Also that the lack of leadership and the excess of political tactics has meant that we have not acted quickly. All this translates into the absence of the necessary single command to solve the devilish logistical problem that persists in our streets, and where I have heard veteran and disoriented military personnel compare us to the earthquake in Haiti.

However, today, when you walk shovel in hand through Benetúser, the town where I grew up and that you probably hadn’t heard of Until a few days ago, I came across, lived with Segovian forest guards removing debris, Basque and Catalan police patrolling, Madrid firefighters sleeping in their carskids like me coming from all corners to make us feel that no, no Valencian walks alone.

When you feel the pain in your flesh, you first help your loved ones and then help those who need it. We Spaniards have always shown our solidarity with other countries, but it has been a long time since we needed to work side by side to try to alleviate a traumatic experience within our borders. That has created in Valencia a spirit of sincere closeness that has spread to the rest of the nationwho considers us one of his own, and who has come from every possible place to the rescue. Visca Valencia and Viva España.