No child will hug the thousands of stuffed animals that lie on the ground full of mud: they smell rotten. Around him, a dozen employees from the Famosa toy logistics plant try to save what they can for next Christmas in a devastated warehouse.
“The only thing we do these days is clean and save everything we can,” an employee explained this Wednesday with a large broom in her hands. Behind her lay thousands of stacked, half-broken boxes that had been floating in the water a week before. Inside you can see Doraemon, a Smurf, Hello Kitty, a Paw Patrol character.
A week after the storm that devastated Valencia, the industrial estates in the affected areas still have not recovered their activity. Only a few companies have been able to partially resume operations. The rest of the employees are still dedicated full time to cleaning up the damage and do not know when they will be able to recover their jobs.
“We have been removing sludge and what we have left for a week,” lamented Mariluz Villar, an employee of a renewables company in the Riba-roja industrial estate in Túria. Running water has been coming and going. 20% of the ships still do not have electricity. Villar’s, for example, was not recovered until Monday. Almost none of them have internet.
Visiting this industrial estate, located 20 kilometers from Valencia, means entering a post-apocalyptic scenario: hundreds of trailers lying down and destroyed, stranded trucks full of branches and garbage, countless cars piled up, puddles and very deep holes… And the omnipresent brown of mud that these days stains the entire affected area.
There are hardly any trucks circulating, only army vehicles, ambulances and fire trucks are seen. Products from adjacent plants are piled up on the sidewalks: toys, packets of napkins, cans of drinks. And furniture—refrigerators, tables, pallet chairs—that can no longer be used.
20,000 people work here. A thousand of them were trapped in the polygon on October 29, when the flood began to flood the streets, and they had to spend the night at their jobs.
Some explained that they were perched on the roof of their ship all night. Others took refuge on top of their trucks, praying that the strong current would not knock them down, in the middle of the darkness and listening to cries for help. “It caught us suddenly because it barely rained here,” recalled Marcial Espinosa, an employee at a plant in the area.
Six of these workers died at the industrial estate the night of the flood, according to the official count. This Wednesday, however, there were still soldiers and UME agents looking for bodies in the cars and in the ravine that is a few meters from the complex.
“The first thing the survivors asked us for was cell phone chargers to notify their families,” recalls Robert Raga, the mayor of Riba-Roja de Túria. The City Council rescued them the next day by sending buses to the area to pick them up and take them to a school where they were given food and dry clothes.
Raga claims the “enormous task” that has been carried out over the last week to try to get the industrial estate back to normal, although he admits that there is still a lot of work to do to get the place operational again.
“The first three days were dedicated to clearing the main roads of the industrial estates of trailers and branches,” explains the mayor. “Now we are trying to recover operations to be able to normalize economic activity again.”
According to the Valencian Statistics Institute, in the regions most affected by DANA there are 21,429 companies that employed 230,000 workers and 28,315 self-employed workers. Both the Generalitat Valenciana and the Chamber of Commerce estimate the damage to the industry at more than 10,000 million euros.
The Federation of Business Estates has admitted that “in most cases” the devastation inside the warehouses is “high.” The scenario in Riba-roja confirmed it: after visiting more than twenty warehouses, there were hardly any in good condition in the most affected areas.
While holding a lit hose, Mariluz Villar, from the renewables company, regretted not having received any type of help from the administration: neither the UME, nor the army nor any authority, she says, has helped her try to recover the activity. The volunteers don’t come here either.
“Only our children and some friends have come,” he lamented. “There are some companies that have many employees and have been able to advance, but others have been doing what we could and we still have days of work left.”
#industries #affected #DANA #remain #paralyzed #removing #sludge #week #left
