Floods in Valencia: the good and the bad before the ugly

It was strange to wake up to eery stillness. Outside the city of Valencia, our place is usually quiet, but all the same there’s always a slight background noise of traffic, on the distant main road. But this time, there was practically nothing. 

It felt like the Covid lockdown, when muted mornings were standard. And indeed we were in a sense locked down. The government of the Valencian region had decreed that no cars should take to the roads until the evening. Why? There’d been a warning of heavy rain and the authorities were taking no risks.

The English proverb is ‘the burned hand fears the fire’. The French equivalent is more to the point, ‘the scalded cat fears cold water’, suggesting that once we’ve suffered harm from something really dangerous, we learn to fear even what isn’t. And then there’s the saying about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Because, though there was some heavy rain that day, there was none of the heavy flooding that sweeps cars away, fills houses with mud and drowns people. No, that happened over two weeks earlier, on 29 October. Then, when warnings really were needed, the regional authorities, whose duty it was, failed to issue any. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. They did issue a warning. At about 8:00 in the evening. One man later told journalists said that his mobile rang with an alert from civil protection when he was in his car and the water was already up to his chin. The first that friends of ours in Paiporta, one of the worst-hit areas, knew of what was about to happen was when they heard sirens and voices shouting, ‘the water is coming, the water is coming’. 

It's like Paul Revere, isn’t it? ‘The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming’. Only British soldiers trying to maintain colonial rule over insurgent American patriots are a lot easier to stop than a wall of water.

Our friend’s husband reacted as many do to a flood, if their car is an underground garage. He ran to it and drove it up to the street, before it could be submerged. That could have turned out very baldy. Many of the dead were trapped in their cars. Our friend was lucky and survived, although by the time he got home he was already up to his knees in water. As for his car, they still haven’t found it – parking it on the street was no safer than leaving it in the garage.

At least our friends had a few minutes to rescue possessions, and the good luck to live in a two-floor house, so they had somewhere to retreat to. 

Some of the moments that followed had a comic quality. They struggled to disconnect the TV from the wall, only succeeding in getting it upstairs once someone had found a screwdriver. They proudly, and laughingly, told us they’d saved their coffee machine. That may sound trivial, but once electricity had been restored, it was a boon to be able to make coffee. Above all, they avoided one of the losses that causes great grief in this kind of disaster: they got their family photos upstairs and saved their memories.

They heaped towels and cloths around the front door, but the water came in around the back. Once it reached them, it took minutes for it flood to a metre and a half up the walls of the ground floor. As it flowed in, they could do nothing but head upstairs.

We took them a Kärcher high-pressure water cleaner (that’s a devices that uses high-pressure water for cleaning, rather than a device for cleaning high-pressure water. Just saying. To avoid confusion). We were able to get within four kilometres by car but had to walk the last stretch.

And as we walked we began to see not only what’s bad about crises like this one but what’s good too. 

Volunteers on the Paiporta road

On the same road were thousands of volunteers, some heading home after a good job well done, some going in to take a turn themselves. Mostly they were young, carrying shovels or brooms, masked and in boots, sometimes with plastic bags wrapped around their legs too, since the mud in the streets was becoming increasingly infectious: sewage had mixed with it and there were also rotting bodies, principally 2950 farm animals but also, estimates suggest, several hundred pets.

Diseased sludge

The mud quickly turned toxic.

Deeper and wetter in some places than others

As we walked further into Paiporta, the mud got deeper, until we had to be careful where we stepped to avoid it flowing into our boots. There were also cars everywhere, piled up two or even three deep, where the water had simply tossed them. We saw an office which had filled with cars. Ironically, it belonged to an insurance company, though sadly it was in no state to deal with the claims the owners of the cars might make.

A different kind of traffic pile-up

Our friends live close to the waterway that burst its banks on the night of the flood. We crossed it on a bridge without parapets, as they’d been washed away. It was a strange experience, looking down into the bed of the river, now quiet and with only a residual stream of water, and think of the damage it had wreaked days earlier.

The Barranco del Poyo
In spate, it broke its banks

All around us, there were people at work. Many were volunteers. But there were also huge numbers of professionals. There were soldiers, many from UME, the military unit for emergencies, but reinforced by many more ordinary soldiers drafted in for rescue and recovery and then the cleanup. There were similar numbers of police, firefighters and other emergency service staff.

The army at work with heavy equipment
Note the (police) cavalry keeping an eye on things

Police cavalry

A great many weren’t even from Valencia. We saw fire vehicles from Barcelona, Navarra, Toledo, but that’s just what we came across. I understand there were teams from all over Spain there and even from other nations, from France and Italy, and even, as we later discovered, from Mexico.

Firemen from Toledo, near Madrid

Which takes me to uglier matters: the bitterness that has followed the flood.

Army bucket chain at work

One complaint I can understand, to be fair. Many victims felt it was taking too long to get basic services going again. It’s painful to be without drinking water or electricity for two or three days. However, for the vast majority (and that includes our friends) that’s all it took – two to three days. Another friend, from Florida, pointed out that two to three weeks without services is not unusual after hurricanes there.

Downright ugly have been the lies that have been told. Even two weeks on, we’re seeing people ranting online, ‘where is the army? Why aren’t they helping?’ Well, I can tell you where the army is. It’s on the ground helping. We saw a dozen soldiers outside our friends’ house, in a bucket chain, shifting mud out of the splash pool in their garden, which had naturally filled up with sludge.

Army helicopter above our home,
ferrying soldiers and supplies in or out of the affected areas

There were soldiers at work all over the affected areas, sometimes even with heavy equipment to clear the streets. Every day, we see large helicopters flying over our house, bringing troops or equipment in or out of the damaged zones. Statistics are dull, but just in brief, 8500 soldiers have been deployed. One of the iconic events in US history is the Battle of Yorktown, where American forces with their French allies definitively defeated the British army. The American army there was 8000-9000 strong. So the Spanish army working to help flood victims is of about the same size. Then there are 9700 police plus firemen and, of course, the hordes of volunteers for the cleanup.

If Washington’s army was big enough for that battle, the resources now deployed in the flood-damaged areas are enough for this one.

The most telling complaint is that warnings were issued too late. A lot too late, given the story of the man receiving an alert when already up to his chin in water. That was down to the regional government, specifically to its president Carlos Mazón. Initially, as ministers sent in national forces to assist, he thanked the central government for sending them. Since then, though, he’s changed his tune and taken to attacking the central government, trying to switch responsibility for the calamitous response to the floods, from his shoulders to theirs.

That’s been the ugliest reaction to the disaster. I’ll return to it shortly. This post has focused on the bad – deaths, damage, disease – and the good – volunteers and national or international health. The ugly has been the political reaction.

That deserves its own post.