The basements on Arts Grafiques Street, in Paiporta, became a death trap on the afternoon of the floods. It is an area of low houses, located just 200 meters from the ravine that overflowed on October 29. Everyone knows someone who died there that day. That afternoon, many reacted the same when they saw how the water reached the underground floors of their houses. They went down to try to rescue furniture, clothes, cars or warehouses. But then the flood came. Some managed to save themselves; others, no.
Amparo’s son and husband managed to survive, even though the water hit them while they were still in the basement. They had gone down to get the carrycot of Amparo’s grandson, who is seven months old. They wanted to keep it safe in the living room, to prevent the water from destroying it. They went down with a flashlight, by then they had already run out of light. Amparo realized that the situation was critical when she began to hear screams. He then saw that the water had risen much higher than he expected. The flood was already climbing up the stairs that connect the basement and the ground floor of his house.
“They noticed a blow on their back that they think was the water when it came in,” explains Amparo, who still has a muddy basement. The force of the flow carried away the garage door and the interior walls of the basements of all the homes in the same block. Suddenly, her son and her husband found themselves floating in the mud, with their heads almost touching the ceiling. About to drown. “They were diving in the mud to get out. At that moment, my husband realized that I was still carrying the flashlight. Everything was dark. It was all mud,” adds this 61-year-old woman.
The light from the flashlight helped them locate themselves. They were near the door. And it was open. His son was the first to come out, then he grabbed his father and pulled him out. Amparo does not remember how she experienced those minutes of uncertainty. I didn’t know what I could do. Her daughter-in-law tells her that she just screamed: “They’re drowning me! They’re drowning me!”
“We have seen death,” explains her husband. When they managed to get out, the whole family hugged each other, crying, aware that they had been on the verge of dying. They were even more so the next morning, when they learned that two of their neighbors, a couple who lived on the other side of the wall, died in that same basement. They had a 16-year-old teenager and an eight-year-old boy.
It took him several days to get back to the basement.
It took Amparo days to come back down the stairs. He needed time to recover from what he had experienced. The mud soaked the walls of the basement, as well as those of the stairs that lead to the living room. In a plastic basket covered in mud, he still keeps the clothes that were destroyed that day. Among the brown, her husband’s burgundy tie peeks out.
For eight days, the family lived with the mud and the stench. They don’t have a door to the basement, so the smell of rot came up the stairs. They stayed like that, with the garage full of mud, until help arrived. “We all owe it to the volunteers. They deserve a monument. We have even had Italians who have taken vacations to come and help,” he adds.
They managed to clean it, but this Thursday it flooded again. The scene was not like that of the morning of October 30 – there was no mud, just two or three fingers of water – but the sensation was. The rains from early Wednesday to Thursday, which placed the province of Valencia once again under a red notice, have once again put the residents of Paiporta on edge.
This municipality has become ground zero for DANA, which has caused the death of 216 people. In Paiporta, 45 have died. Therefore, during the early hours of Wednesday to Thursday, with a new notice from the AEMET, many neighbors were alert. “Our fear was that the sewers would start dumping more water and it would rise. We spent the whole night without sleeping, waiting,” explains Amparo.
Fina, her neighbor across the street, also spent the early morning like this. He was bailing water all night. In his family everyone is safe, but he also knows neighbors who died from DANA: a veterinarian, a lawyer – according to his story – or a teacher. Her husband also took a risk by moving the car out of the garage and parking it on the sidewalk.
The Generalitat sent a Civil Protection alert to mobile phones this Wednesday around 7:45 p.m. in which it communicated the red alert level: “Heavy rain will occur from the afternoon-night of the 13th and during the 14th.” The residents of Arts Grafiques de Paiporta street welcomed this decision. On October 29, the alert, however, came late, when many municipalities were already flooded.
“When the alarm went off yesterday [por el miércoles] we were nervous. We knew that if it rained a lot it would flood again,” explains Teresa, 72, at the door of her house, while several neighbors, led by her husband, put hoses in the basement to try to get the water that has entered due to the rains to come out. with a bomb. All the neighbors explain that what they feared most in this second DANA were the sewers. They have been blocked for weeks.
These single-family houses are at the entrance of the municipality, next to several industrial estates. The multi-lane road that separates the houses from the warehouses has become a pool of mud through which Army trucks, fire trucks and volunteer vans pass.
Teresa’s house faces that road. She has lost everything she had in the garage. He spent two or three days without electricity or water. His daughter, who lives in the center of the municipality, has been left homeless. They say they have felt abandoned for days, and now they fear it will happen again. They live in fear of a new flood, not because of the ravine, but because of torrential rains if they do not clean up the municipal pipe system. “We know that it has been devastating, but we want them to provide means,” claims Teresa. This Wednesday, when her cell phone started beeping again upon receiving the alert, her daughter had an anxiety attack. The water couldn’t take anything away, he had already lost everything.
#fear #happening #Paiporta #lives #DANA #suspense
