Day 6 in the heart of Spain’s flood-devastated area: Still dazed and angry, locals praise young volunteers

In the Spanish town of Alfafar, in the flood-hit region of Valencia, volunteers and residents — some with shovels and others with wooden boards — push the watery mud to the drainpipes on Ciudad de Calatayud Street. On this avenue lined with houses whose innards lie piled up outside their front doors, looking like butchered animals, a woman points to a mountain of belongings covered in fresh mud. There are dozens of such piles out on the street. Everything is rotting away and one can barely make out some broken furniture, a few household appliances. In other circumstances, it would make sense to think that this was an old pile of junk that had not been collected for decades. But just a week ago this was somebody’s life. The owner of the pile, Cati Rodríguez, points at what’s left of her home: “That over there is my living room. A little further on is my kitchen,” she says. She looks at the house, noting how incredibly high the water level reached. “Shall I sell it to you?”

On Tuesday, Cati went down to the garage to take her car to a higher place. Many testimonies concur: everyone believed that if there was any flooding at all later in the day, it might be serious enough to damage their vehicles, but not to endanger their lives. So Cati took out her car and parked it in what she thought was a safe place, but the sudden rush of water flowing out of the Poyo ravine caught her off guard. Soon the water was up to her waist and she found that she could not return home. Then it got dark. The power went out. And the night from hell began. “A few of us were saved after breaking a ground-floor entrance with mallets and climbing up to the terrace. We were there from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.. With the town already flooded, sitting up there, that’s when we received an alert from Civil Protection,” she recalls. Her husband, who has cancer, took shelter on the upper floor. Now they will both go live with their daughter. Standing next to Cati is her neighbor from across the street, José Delgado: “The volunteers get a grade of 10. But I give a 0 to the coordination effort,” he says, echoing a widespread feeling that the government response has been slow and insufficient, compared with the thousands of volunteers who self-organized and quickly went to Valencia to help out. “Soldiers in civilian clothes showed up here a few days ago because they weren’t allowed to come in uniform,” Cati Rodríguez adds.

Six days have elapsed and the city of Valencia, crossed by a 500-metre-long seam — the artificial bed of the Turia River, whose natural course was diverted to the south in the 1960s after a massive flooding episode — continues to clean its streets, its businesses and its homes, and above all, to search for its missing people. Between the neighborhoods of San Marcelino and La Torre, on either side of the old riverbed, the difference is stark: one is a place where civilization is still going about its daily business: there are open cafés, pharmacies, supermarkets, clothing boutiques. On the other side, everything is on hold. You have to walk a long way from La Torre, as well as from the municipalities of Alfalfar, Senaví or Benatússer, in order to get to San Marcelino, where people are going above all to get tools: insulating tape, shovels, hammers, hoses, hydraulic pumps. Hundreds of people have been crossing on foot from the towns of l’Horta Sud to the city of Valencia, back and forth every day since the day after the flash floods.

And it’s not just them. Young people between the ages of 15 and 35 have been crossing the renamed Solidarity Walkway at all hours of the day, carrying shovels, rakes, buckets, cleaning rags, jugs of water and basic food. Loaded like mules, they travel for several kilometers (there is no public transportation and no unauthorized private vehicles may enter the affected areas) and, once they arrive, they bend their backs and start cleaning for hours. The flash floods have taken many lives, many homes and destroyed many families (and probably also several political careers) but the only positive thing about it is that it has swept away a widespread view about the so-called “glass generation,” used pejoratively to describe individualistic, jaded youths with recurrent anxiety problems (anxiety being used here not as an illness but as a joke); these young people had been berated by the older generations in writing and in speech, and parodied in memes by other generations.

But they have turned out to be the most moving thing about this entire catastrophe: they are everywhere offering food, water, facemasks, sanitizing gel; they are sweeping, mopping, moving packages, pushing cars. And in return, the local residents are showing them a devotion that is truly impressive — it would be impossible to reproduce all the thanks they received just on Monday. After wrapping garbage bags around their legs and holding them with tape, dressed as if to enter a war zone, a group of youths who look no older than 20 talk about what they will do after work. “Beers?” says one. “But we won’t tell those who haven’t come here today,” jokes another.

On Benidoleig Street, in the La Torre neighborhood of Valencia, a group of municipal workers are standing in a circle. They are wearing a visible badge that shows they are in charge of pest control. “We are on the lookout for mosquitoes, rodents — accumulated trash and food remains are obvious sources — we check drains, supply cleaning and disinfection products, open sewers if people need to relieve themselves,” says Antonio Ferrando. In many cases they are following the instructions of biologists. They are on the lookout for infection or disease in places where the smell of putrefaction is unbearable.

Opposite this group, several employees of a Consum supermarket are protecting dozens of trolleys loaded with food and packages all covered in mud. “Please don’t take photos. We have to protect the image of the supermarket,” they plead. Next to the supermarket, a parked car has a sign on it: “Still works. Do not take it away.” There are cars by the hundreds everywhere, crashed against the wall, one on top of the other, smashed cars that probably floated into town with the floodwaters, crashing into everything. They lie here now, with all their windows smashed in and thick layers of mud covering the steering wheel, the dashboard and the upholstery. Cars under tree branches, with leaves and foliage and rubbish inside the engines, with bits of paper and toys on the car seats. Although some of these cars look totaled, their owners are refusing to send them to the scrapyard. A Porsche Cayenne has a sign saying: “Do not take it away. It could still work.” A Toyota has another message for cleanup crews: “Do not take it. Pending delivery to a Toyota workshop.” Yet another: “Do not take it. The engine starts.”

In the town of Benetússer, Agostino Céfalo, a native of Venezuela whose parents were Italian and who has lived in Valencia for 15 years, has a story to tell. He was returning from Torrent on Tuesday, and seeing what was happening up there, he decided to leave the car and run home instead, because his mother was there all alone. But he was not able to get very far. The current was too strong already, and he found shelter in the nearby Ikea store, where he clung to some ropes, along with many other people in the same situation. From there he saw a local bus that was getting flooded, turning into a death trap for the passengers and the driver. People began to get out of the vehicle. Five or six of them held on to a tree as best they could to keep the current from sweeping them away. They were, Céfalo says, about five or six meters away from them, so with ropes and a human chain, they managed to get them all into the Ikea one by one. There were more people out there, but they were clinging to trees further away, and the mass of cars floating by at full speed prevented anyone from reaching them. Finally, when the rush of water subsided, these people were also saved. By then, Céfalo’s mother had already rung the doorbell upstairs to take shelter and save her life. “My story is not even the most interesting one,” he notes, pointing to the house next door. “My neighbor went down to the garage of this building with some other residents and found two people about to die. They couldn’t get out of the car. They had already called their relatives to say goodbye. The neighbors broke the window and were able to get them out.” It’s amazing how for many people, five minutes made the difference between life and death.

On Nou de Octubre Street in Alfafar, there is, miraculously, a shop that is still operational. It is the only one that reporters have seen in a first — though not very exhaustive — walk through the affected municipalities. There is, of course, a huge line outside. A sign on the door warns: “Cash only, the payment terminal is out of order.” It is a tobacco shop. A local resident, Teresa Cózar, smiles brightly yet sadly: “Bad day to stop smoking.”

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