Morocco sends help to flood-hit Valencia: ‘They are soldiers of the Sahara who work without stopping to eat or rest’

Drief Elkramar’s crew never stops. Their tanker truck has travelled almost 500 miles from the port city of Tangier, in Morocco, to Spain’s eastern Valencia province, where flash floods caused by record rainfall on October 29 left a trail of over 200 deaths and large-scale destruction. Now, residents of Calle Cruz Roja street in the municipality of Alfafar — just south of the city of Valencia — can breathe a sigh of relief.

Elkramar, 49, does not speak a single word of Spanish, but that is not a problem for the work that he and his crew are performing: cleaning the sewers without pause. One of his colleagues introduces a black hose an inch and a half wide into a drain pipe inside the courtyard of the house located at No.9 and starts pumping in water. “The pressure is so strong it could pierce your leg,” explains Abselam Abbel-lah, who works for Civil Protection in the city of Ceuta and is acting as the interpreter for this Moroccan contingent specializing in unclogging drainage systems.

A few feet away, another worker locates the sewer that connects to the drain of the house and sticks in a wide suction hose that sucks up the mud and assorted trash clogging the pipes. The remains end up inside the tanker of the truck, which flies the Moroccan flag. From time to time, the truck departs to get rid of the mud and returns to start the process all over again.

Morocco has sent 36 tanker trucks and nearly a hundred workers to speed up the cleanup of the drainage systems, whose poor condition is now one of the biggest public health problems facing the towns most affected by the flash floods, which destroyed homes, carried away vehicles and filled everything with a thick mix of water, mud and debris.

The cleanup work in this corner of Alfafar is proving complicated because all the pipes in the neighborhood converge on the 30 feet of road that make up Calle Cruz Roja, where around 20 families reside, explains Juan Sebastiá, coordinator of the cleanup operation in Alfafar. And the problem is aggravated because the main drainage corridors are full of all kinds of trash. “Yesterday we pulled a toilet out of the sewer,” explains this official, jumping on an uncovered sewer topped by a solid mountain of rubble. The help provided by the Moroccan contingent has been vital.

These workers parked their first tanker truck on Friday morning. For most of the locals, their arrival was a complete surprise. Since then, a team of six people has been working tirelessly; from time to time a neighbor comes over to ask for a favor that has nothing to do with the muddy sewers, such as opening a jammed lock or moving a vehicle to clear the way. “They are warriors of the Sahara who work without stopping to eat or rest,” says Ayman, the interpreter who accompanies the team.

French and Portuguese troops

Virginia Barcones, Spain’s Director General of Civil Protection and Emergency, explains that this Moroccan contingent has been joined by around 100 more volunteers from France and Portugal who have brought along excavators, backhoes and cargo trucks. These are in addition to the 94 Spanish sewer dredging trucks working in the area.

Barcones, whose department answers to Spain’s central government, said that Morocco offered to help “from the first day after the tragedy” but that regional authorities in Valencia did not inform the National Centre for Monitoring and Coordination of Emergencies (CENEM) that the help was being accepted until midday on 12 November, almost two weeks after the flooding. “We insisted every possible way, but the system is like that, whoever is in charge makes the decisions, in this case, the [Valencian] regional government,” said Barcones, reflecting the ongoing political wrangling over who was supposed to have dealt with the emergency that day. Affected residents have complained that they were left to fend for themselves in the days following the tragedy, and that the only significant help came from thousands of self-organized volunteers who flocked to the area from all parts of Spain.

Inside the home of Juan Madrigal, a water mark on the wall indicates how high the floodwaters reached, about 60 inches. Madrigal says that the cleanup work has not stopped since then, and that all the progress achieved has been thanks to the help of volunteers. “The first week we had cars in the streets, the next week, there was furniture, and now we have muddy water that we cannot drain.” In Madrigal’s garage, which is directly connected to the house via a staircase, there are almost four inches of mud covering everything.

Mud and fecal waste

Communication with the Moroccan workers has not been a problem, says Madrigal. “If you want to understand each other, you can always find a way, even if you don’t speak the same language,” he says, calling their assistance “wonderful.” For other neighbors, the cleaning problems are compounded by the fact that the mud has been mixed with fecal waste from downpipes destroyed by the flooding. Sebastiá, the coordinator of the area, explains that they have had problems cleaning these buildings because this type of contaminated mud must be transported to locations far away from urban centers, and they have not yet received authorization to transport it.

“In this neighborhood, we’ve had to wear facemasks almost from day one,” explains Laura Hernández, who lives at No. 14 and remarks that some volunteers who came to help returned home with respiratory and skin problems. The regional government has warned that strong winds expected in the coming days may generate dust, and the use of masks has been recommended.

The smell has improved as the drainage work has progressed. But the magnitude of the challenge has exceeded the expectations of Elkramar, who has been working in drainage system cleaning for 25 years. This expert from Tangier admits that these have been the most difficult days he can remember. Unblocking the sewage system of the entire street has taken him and his team almost two days, with working days that begin at 7 a.m. and end when darkness falls, at around 6 p.m. Abbel-lah explains that there are six other groups working in the affected municipalities, and that each day a coordinator assigns them a different street. Elkramar notes that they have arrived without a return date. He believes that, given the magnitude of the problem, they will spend several more weeks in the town.

Jesús Sonera, manager of the sewage cleanup company Desatranques Jaén, explained to EL PAÍS that there are nearly 500 miles of blocked pipes in the towns south of the city of Valencia. According to his calculations, each truck could clear approximately 1300 feet a week, working in 12-hour shifts. With a fleet of 100 trucks dedicated to the task, it would take around five months of continuous work to complete the cleanup job.

Laura Hernández, from No. 14, says that Spanish workers from the regions of Guadalajara, the Canary Islands, Alicante and Galicia arrived in the area earlier, but without tanker trucks or machinery to help with the cleanup. She smiles with relief, because thanks to the help from abroad, with every passing day the situation on her street is getting closer to normal.

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