Valencia wakes up on the day of the dead with more than 200 on the table. But in the capital, somewhat quieter than usual, families dressed for the holidays walk to the parks and groups of young people have breakfast on the terraces. There are taxis, zebra crossings and cars move quickly along the large avenues. A normal holiday, except for the bikes loaded with jugs of water and groups of people carrying bags and backpacks. They go to ground zero, l’Horta Sud, the epicenter of the greatest catastrophe in living memory, seven kilometers from the Town Hall Square of Spain’s third city. Bus 27 carries an army of broom-wielding youths who are not from the Halloween witch hangover. At seven stops the door opens. Welcome to The Tower.
The soil is still brown and the neighbors continue struggling to get rid of the mud by hand, with precarious tools. They are groups of friends who look at each other from time to time: they don’t know when they will end or if it will be of any use. There is a lack of trucks and water cannons to effectively get rid of the mud, and the streets need to be dredged. For someone who went to La Torre for the first time, the worst DANA of the century could have happened yesterday, not three days ago. Some, at times, have recovered electricity and water. Surviving there, where there are no shops, doctors or supermarkets, is still a matter of friends, charity and destiny.
Except for a few trucks and a couple of overflowing police patrols, which put up no-passing tapes that no one respects, there is no sign that the State is coming here. The avalanche of volunteers disembarks at La Torre without anyone directing them. The Local Police of Valencia has an awning with a person to lead the aid operation. There is plenty of desire to do something, but all the logistics are missing. The Valencia City Council has just set up a food distribution point in the neighborhood managed by an NGO. They are ‘lucky’, since the floods they had to go look for food walking a kilometer every day.
There is a lot of anger in La Torre: “The fucking photos, I don’t know why they come here to take photos,” says a twenty-year-old girl with a two-year-old girl astride her. There is anger for the dead, for the houses that are no longer houses and, above all, because it is the third day of managing alone.
As in Catarroja, Sedaví, Picanya, Massanassa, Chiva. As in Alfafar, whose mayor desperately asked this Thursday for someone to come: “There are people living in houses with dead people.” He is from the PP, like the regional government, but he did not hesitate to criticize that no one had arrived. “We have local police and a regional patrol. “We have had to empty a supermarket and distribute.” They asked volunteer health workers to help them or bring them medicine. Even if there are damages, childbirth, viruses or appendicitis do not stop. The day was sunny, the cold drop had passed and Alfafar continued to survive with volunteers and barter.
No one could enter Catarroja until Thursday. Masses of cars, apocalypses in the streets, without electricity, water or telephone through which to ask for help for elderly people or for emergencies. There are neighbors who have had to walk 10 kilometers to go to relatives’ houses. You leave on foot, stepping in mud and avoiding piles of cars because there is no infrastructure. At this time there are an unknown number of bodies to be recovered and families who know nothing about theirs. This also has a public health aspect, because the decomposition of corpses, and even more so in a muddy and humid environment, can lead to diseases.
A woman gave birth in Silla during the worst of the flood. There are those who have had to drink a glass of water, if they are lucky, a day. Like Silvia, who was caught by the flood in Aldaia: “We were about 15 people sheltering in the corner of a polygon standing for six hours in the rain, we saw a waterspout passing by us with doors, containers and even a trailer of truck.” She survived due to the solidarity of Ana and Greta, who housed her, clothed her and fed her along with their families.
After the tragedy, and in the absence of rapid management to alleviate the effects of the shortage, chains of favors have had to be set up, the buildings have made communal pantries and have cared for the elderly and children with volunteers and health workers who were also trapped in many towns. Someone accompanied someone to look for their car, someone lent someone their phone, and someone got someone else’s blood pressure pills. In the midst of that chaos, looting and arrests for vandalizing and stealing carshouses and supermarkets. The lack of agents, light and basic supplies have served as mortar for chaos and anger.
The local police of each municipality do what they can. Before the floods that swept their towns they had no information or coordination for what was coming. They don’t have much now either. In Benetússer, where the tongue of water has erased the police station from the map, they have neither shoes for themselves nor material to help the neighbors. “Here we see trucks passing by, but not for anyone, we ask the neighbors for things, a generator, and we help others as we can,” says an agent on Friday afternoon.
Although the situation is improving little by little in some municipalities – the Army has finally arrived in Paiporta – it is difficult to understand why post-war precariousness has been imposed 15 minutes by car from the capital.
First, because a quantity of liters equivalent to four times the capacity of the Ebro fell down the ravine. This must be combined with the lack of speed of the Generalitat when requesting extraordinary resources from the State, a questionable management that adds to the criticism for the lack of action to prevent the damage of the worst DANA of the century, with alerts that came too late.
The first time that the Valencian government asked the central office to send reinforcements from the UME (the Military Emergency Unit, dependent on the Ministry of Defense) was on Tuesday at noon for Utiel. At night, at 8:36 p.m. and with all of Horta Sud already devastated, the Mazón government requested more reinforcements, which could not be deployed until the waters subsided.
They waited until Thursday to ask for more troops to help with logistics, despite the fact that by then the requests for help from mayors and neighbors were already a clamor. Furthermore, the management of the emergency, in the hands of the Valencian Community government, has distributed military units unequally. There are populations that have it and populations that don’t. There are regional administrations that have offered to collaborate, such as Catalonia, which at the moment has not been requested for help. The same has happened with the forest firefighters of Valencia, who have reported that they want to help and are being “underused.”
Added to the magnitude of the tragedy and the response times are mobility difficulties for citizens and access for machinery and the Army in some municipalities. The floods left local roads devastated, bridges down and damage to four essential roads for Valencia: the one that goes to Madrid, the one that goes to Alicante and the ring road, still full of cars and with remains of the loads that hundreds of trucks lost. . The train connection with Madrid will be stopped for at least two weeks. The metro does not expect to return to normality for months. Road collapses since the Tuesday of the tragedy are common.
To organize all this mobility, the Generalitat accounts limit themselves to “asking” people not to go to the DANA areas or not to take the car. For now, the appeal has had no effect and heavy military and civil aid vehicles have serious difficulties moving or repairing roads.
There are localities that have seen firefighters or water tankers to relieve thirst, but not the Army or a logistical plan to help with daily issues or cleaning. For example, in La Torre, where the EMU is scheduled to arrive in the next few hours and where household brooms continue to be the main tool. The festive Friday morning there has meant cleaning without seeing the end and continuing to look for food. Someone asks in the church square if there is soup or something hot. In many houses you cannot cook, although there are those who have a small stove. A human chain transports boxes with donations so that those who were having a casual meal on comfortable tablecloths on Tuesday could eat.
I turn around. I walk and go. In 20 minutes you can abandon La Torre and leave there a traumatized world with problems to survive while thousands of volunteers flock there this festive Friday, on their way to saturating the roads without, once again, the competent administration taking any effective measure to prevent it. prevent
Silvia also made that trip from hell to normality, but she did it by bus. From Aldaia to Valencia: “They walked with me far away, to the Cristo neighborhood, to see if I could go to Valencia and from there to my house, in Barcelona, because I had come here for work.” He had lost his car, his suitcase, he had survived by drinking little, not being able to wash, rationing food. A bus passed by and picked up Silvia. Upon arriving in the capital, this Thursday, the bus doors spit her out in the center of the city, next to the Plaza de España. It was sunny. He was wearing borrowed sneakers, small for his size and full of mud. “I was shocked. The bars were open and people were laughing.”
#bus #stops #gates #hell
