The political fray over the catastrophic DANA, which marks one month today in the province of Valencia, continues at its most critical moment. That search for ‘culprits’ travels in parallel to the lives of tens of thousands of Valencians who suffer daily among a landscape of mud in streets and garages, piled up cars, debris and even sewage that is discharged uncontrollably due to the collapse of collectors and sewage networks.
The balance of victims a month later is devastating: 222 victims fatal and 4 missing. It is the worst side of the natural catastrophe. It gives an idea of the magnitude of that brutal flood of water that has changed the lives of thousands of Valencians, many of them broken and empty of hope.
In these 31 days since the Magro river, the Turia river and the Poyo ravine overflowed, the Administrations have focused their actions on ensuring that improve mobility of citizens with the putting into service of the AVE, the Cercanías trains and the Metro, the roads, the repair of bridges or the main roads of the municipalities.
Es the only progress really noticeable. Now, thousands of Valencians have to arrive by bus to the city of Valencia, which acts as a shuttle in the absence of some Cercanías lines and the Metro network, which in the southern metropolitan area of the Turia capital will not be in operation until next summer.
a drama
In its urban area and in the municipality of Torrent, Picanya, PaiportaSedaví, Catarroja, Aldaia, Chiva, Benetússer, Alfafar, Utiel, Sot de Chera, Algemesí or Alcudia, among many others, is still a drama for its neighbors.
The silenceabandonment and lack of light in many streets of towns in l’Horta Sud are part of the daily landscape, as has been confirmed They got up this week. The mud is still present and a month later it is still on top of many sidewalks, parks, gardens, homes and garages.
It is solidified with special force inside the sewer network and becomes volatile when the wind blows, converting the health problems into a real concern.
That mud installed on the ground floor of many homes and in private garages (where the Minister of Defense, Maragarita Robles, recently had a bitter exchange of opinions with the neighbors) is endangering the housing structures due to accumulated humidity.
Uninhabitable houses
More than 140 houses will have to be demolished and another 1,600 are currently uninhabitable, although the damage from the flood has affected many more because only in the most damaged area – about seven times the city of Madrid – nearly 200 have already been shored up.
humidity present inside homes represents a serious health risk. Until they dry out, the renovations cannot begin and they have already taken some lives.
This is the case that this media has been able to learn about of an elderly man who died in a hospital in Valencia as a result of a respiratory infection by a bacteria derived from the humidity existing in their property in a municipality of l’Horta Sud.
The extraction of mud from private garages began this week and the focus has been on more than 660 that are almost in the same state as they were after the flood. The proximity to Poyo ravine It has caused severe flooding in the basements of the cities it passes through or surrounds, but it still passes through towns relatively close to the capital along the Turia River.
The money that does not arrive
The hard one bureaucratic journey Applying for help is everyday life for many families. First came the time to recover the basic documentation, then the damage assessment and then the claim for aid.
The slowness in receiving money from the Administrations is exasperating and although the Generalitat has already transferred money to 3,000 families, there are many who today do not have furniture, nor memories collected in photographs or computers; neither cars nor business that before were the family’s breadwinner.
The neighbors affected by the catastrophe have seen how they have not yet even been able to have many of their children (almost 10,000) return to their homes. schools. They continue to be devastated and are making temporary trips to other educational centers. Meanwhile, there are no parks to spend the hours in because they are all full of rubble.
Together with the children, the older people They are the greatest victims of this catastrophe that is taking place in Valencia. Many of them with mobility problems have not been able to go down to the street for weeks because the elevators do not work and will take weeks or months to be repaired.
Lack of means
The solidarity of the neighbors allows them to receive food and basic items in their homes. Nobody who lives in the province of Valencia can deny that the means deployed to help neighbors are insufficient.
The disbelief is absolute for the victims who continue to see many soldiers quartered (8,000 soldiers on the ground are like a drop in an ocean of destruction), the same thing that causes astonishment that all the necessary personnel of Firefighters and State Security Corps and Forces are not deployed and coordinated.
The State’s response, according to the neighbors questioned by this means, “It is not according to the first world”. Allowing that perception to spread and take root is a failure that the political class should review due to the erosion it can mean for belief in the established system.
The Generalitat affirms that it has deployed “all its capabilities.” With that and with the help requested from the Government (because there is no proactivity on the part of Pedro Sánchez to send it) it has been shown that it is not enough to maintain minimum conditions of well-being.
mountains of cars
Another persistent photo of the dark scene of the areas that were flooded are the mountains of cars accumulated in parks, soccer fields and improvised camps. This week they have begun to be withdrawn in a very slow drip that predicts many weeks of permanence because they are 126.000 the damaged vehicles.
The Silla track is an example of that vestige of the brutal flood on a route that thousands of Valencians take every day and that reminds them that they are still lacking help. It is as if a Madrid resident were passing through along the M-30 seeing cars stacked four or five high on both sides of the highway for kilometers.
The lack of control is such that many neighbors who park their vehicles on the street, faced with the impossibility of using their garages, place signs inside that read: “This vehicle works”. They do this to avoid being confused with those that have been left unusable, since there have been cases in which they have been removed by crane to areas where they are piled up on top of each other.
Insurance companies are also overwhelmed and many professionals cannot even go to homes to assess damage to homes, so they end up doing their work through video calls with the tenants.
Sewage
And the smell. That smell that remains for months flooding the environment with the mud itself (tell this to the inhabitants of the Ribera who suffered from the Tous swamp in 1982) and with all the dirt that the flood dragged along. It is noticeable from the moment one enters the Solidaridad bridge from Valencia towards the district of La Torre (very affected but, still, one of the first towns to be able to return to normality).
The fetid smell that the neighbors live with contributes to the sewer collapse which has caused sewage to rise to homes up to the second floor. Also the overflow of collectors like the one that comes down from Torrent and that has left spills in the Poyo ravine coming from the second most populated city in the province (now they are beginning to repair it with temporary pipelines).
Almost a dozen purifiers have been left unused and they have overloaded others like Pinedo, which can barely avoid spills into the Albufera and the sea. It remains to be seen how long the provisional nature of all the infrastructures that have been repaired and all those that remain to be put into operation will last.
The feeling of abandonment
The pain and living conditions far from a 21st century Spain make up the apocalyptic scenario with which Valencians live a month after the passage of DANA through a long list of up to 78 municipalities.
Recovery in industries, SMEs, industrial estates and activities such as agriculture will take years: the economic invoice will far exceed 31,000 million euros.
Social and sentimental reparation for Valencia and its inhabitants advances at a snail’s pace. Now that the volunteers are dwindling; technical, human and specialized machinery resources continue to be scarce; and the media focus begins to shift: Valencians continue to feel like they did a month ago, forgotten and abandoned.
Source: www.vozpopuli.com
