On October 29, Utiel – a town of 12,000 inhabitants culturally closer to La Mancha than to Valencia – suffered not one, but two floods due to DANA that devastated half the city. A waterspout came from the mountains and crossed the main road of the town, which is on a slope. From the lower part, through the ravine of the Magro River, came a tongue of mud that devastated the entire riverside neighborhood, with one or two-story houses and inhabited by many elderly people. Six neighbors died and 300 houses were destroyed.
As in l’Horta Sud, they were left without electricity, without water and without telephones for hours. But Utiel has a lot of advantage in the reconstruction. While in Paiporta or Catarroja the garages are still flooded and the cars and belongings piled up in many streets, with sanitary precautions and wellies, in Utiel you can already see white sneakers and half heels. Fruit markets. Bars. Children’s strollers and shopping carts.
The neighborhood that was flooded, next to the avenue where the festivals are held, is today a sunny ghost town. Those who lived there have left, although they have left doors and windows open to air an acrid smell of humidity that gets into the graves and bones in minutes. “Are you from gas?” María Rosa is a septuagenarian and today she went to what was her home to receive the Generalitat technician, who is going from house to house assessing damage. In Utiel they are already in the paperwork and aid phase. She and her husband were saved because their house is wall to wall with the Civil Guard barracks. “We climbed onto this roof with this ladder and shouted ‘help’ across the common patio, and they came for us. “They gave us dry clothes and we spent the night in the barracks.”
Today he reviews his house, where the little that remains is stored away. “Let’s see what they give us.” For now, and after a few days at her sister’s house, they have gone to a hostel: “Everyone wants to help us and give us accommodation, a few days is fine, but everyone has to live their life,” says this retired teacher.
Now there is a housing emergency, confirms the mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón (PP), for all those who have lost their home, who are currently finding accommodation with friends and family. Walking with Gabaldón through the town means stopping to say hello at every step. “Thank goodness you closed the institute, if not, what a disgrace,” says a worker who is cleaning the planters that overlook the devastated neighborhood.
That day didn’t happen anymore because at seven in the morning, the mayor ordered the educational centers to close: “I found out that there were roads with problems, a lot of rain and I said ‘either we close now or we can’t anymore.'” The secondary school is 20 hands from the river that overflowed. The ground floor is cordoned off and tables and chairs are piled up where the waters reached. A group of workers and tractor drivers replace the students and talk about the tasks where before there were screams and life.
In addition to the authorities’ foresight, the Utileans had an asset in their favor in the worst DANA of the century: in Utiel it did rain, and hard, all day. Faced with the persistent downpour and without schools, many residents took precautions, many fewer cars had circulated. Those who could, stayed at home and did not go out. Many of them, older people with reduced mobility.
Utiel is also the first town where the Military Emergency Unit (UME) arrived, which has already been replaced by cleaning crews, electricians, tanker trucks to clean asphalt from Madrid or sewer unblockers. “I called Minister Pradas and the Government Delegation in the morning and asked the UME at around one in the afternoon,” says Gabaldón, going down the hill, pointing to the bar where he himself had to take refuge from the flood that came from the mountains. When the military arrived they could no longer enter the town until the waters subsided. From there, cleaning, removing mud, firefighters… The photo album of the almost 70 towns swept by the mud.
How is it possible that at the same time l’Horta Sud or Chiva continue to have problems and Utiel is on the road to reconstruction? In addition to the size of the flood (it was not completely flooded) or that when it rained a lot there was more caution, the key is that it is an agricultural town – it has tractors and trucks – and it is small enough for enormous solidarity to emerge among the neighbors. Carmen was one of the volunteers who cooked 500 hot meals on the street and made coffee for six days at a stall they set up on the sidewalk. “The young people who came, who brought everything they paid for with their own money, made me cry,” he says while he can’t help but cry again.
But if there is a quorum in Utiel in anything, it is in the essential role that the tractor drivers played. Without firefighters or army in the first moments, and with the streets of the river area under more than a meter of water, the tractors appeared. “They took people out with shovels,” says Gabaldón, who estimates that between them and a helicopter they got, they saved about “60 or 70” people until seven in the afternoon, when night fell on the fateful day of the 29th. L’Horta Sud de València, at that time, was experiencing its worst moment. In Utiel they held their breath all night, until the waters subsided and they went, when dawn broke, to assess the damage.
The tractor drivers then became essential again, both they and the trucks, for the removal of all the remnants left by the flood. Private people, self-employed people or machinery from agricultural and livestock companies who paraded there, next to public services when they could get there, until it was passable. “Here we have done almost everything ourselves,” agree the neighbors, who send eternal thanks to the groups of young volunteers, that so-called generation of glass that has turned out to be made of steel.
Little memory of that horror remains visible, fortunately for the eyes and mental health. Just when you leave the town, on the opposite bank, there is a gloomy mud beach with vehicles upside down. But in the center of town life happens normally, with parents, children, grandparents in the sun, bakeries open and cars driving. The disaster is only revealed by a thin layer of sand that covers everything and the globs of dry mud that remain scattered on the steps of any building.
The damage in the countryside in this rural economy remains to be assessed. Utiel is a wine producer and his luck is that the harvest ended in October and a large part of the process was done. The winemaker of his cooperative, Vicente Ramos, ventures that the damage will be significant: “Our cooperative members are farmers who bring their grapes here and we know that the flood has devastated many fields.” A hectare of vineyard is valued at about 10,000 euros, “and it must be said that it takes three years to be harvested.” Vicente was in the laboratory when he saw that a flood was passing through the town. They had to stay there until it subsided. The water devastated the store, the wines floated out. “They came to help us clean up the Iniesta Cooperative, they sent people even though we are competition,” he says, grateful and excited. Engines and machines were rendered useless and now they will have to clean the inside of all the tanks, which have been damaged by the mud.
Meanwhile, in the Utiel City Hall there is a transfer of papers and data is recorded. “I’ll give you here those of the Generalitat and those of the State,” says an official to a woman whose basement has flooded. A man asks about Rosa, because although he has cleaned up his mess, he still has a finger of mud left and needs a truck. Everyone knows each other and encourages each other. Internet is the oral word. NGOs are the friends of the school. Chef José Andrés are the neighbors who were not affected by the water because they lived high up. The UME were at first the tractor drivers. In Utiel, when nothing worked, everything worked the old way. Today, where there was mud, there are trucks, technicians, cleaners and crews. “Utiel is not going to forget this,” says one man to another in the Plaza de la Puerta del Sol, but he is already in the phase of looking for the exit door.
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