Everyone in Chiva has their own memories of what happened here a week ago. For some it is the frantic phone calls to loved ones; for others, the disbelief as this small Valencian town, like so many others, was swallowed up by flood waters that bore away cars and trees as if they were paper boats.
For Lourdes Vallés, it is the sound of a car horn sounding through the sodden darkness of last Tuesday night.
“That car was swept by outside and I didn’t know that cars start up when they’re flooded,” she says, standing in the damp ruins of the medical clinic she runs.
“The horn was going – beep! beep! beep! – like it was asking for help. I just can’t get that out of my head. The sound of it and the powerlessness I felt. There was nothing I could do.”
That sense of powerlessness lingers in Chiva, despite the arrival on Tuesday morning of more troops with rucksacks and bed rolls, despite the army of volunteers with brooms and despite the good Samaritans who pad the streets, offering residents water, sandwiches, bananas and apples.
Chiva now has the feeling of a garrison town, which seems bitterly appropriate. “It was like we were in Afghanistan the next day,” says Vallés. “It was like a bomb had gone off.”
Elena, a Romanian woman who lives close to the ravine that bisects Chiva, reluctantly accepted a banana from an insistent volunteer. But what she really wants is to be able to get back into the flat she shared with her late husband, and to start putting her life back together.
“It’s a good thing that my husband’s dead because this would have given him a heart attack,” she says, pointing to the ravine and the wrecked houses. “There was a wooden bridge here but that was swept away and the water here reached a height of 2 metres. I don’t need this banana. I just need help to get all my stuff cleared out.”
People sweep mud from a warehouse in a flood damaged area in Chiva. Photograph: Alberto Saiz/AP
A municipal architect who has just inspected the flat reassures her that the army will be along in a minute. “There are people on the way,” he says, “and they’re stronger than you or me.”
Farther up the same road, not far from the damp, late 18th century church of St John the Baptist, which has become a storeroom for bottles of bleach, buckets, mops and brooms, Loles Ferrer, and her sister, María Jesús, have come to check on their parents’ house.
For them, the fear and desperation of a week ago have given way to an unpleasant feeling of deja vu as some Spanish politicians engage in a familiar blame game. From the Madrid train bombings of 2004 to the Covid pandemic and now to the floods that have claimed at least 217 lives, it seems there is no tragedy that cannot be cheapened, twisted and sharpened into a political weapon.
It was like we were in Afghanistan the next day
Over recent days, Valencia’s regional leader, Carlos Mazón – a member of the conservative People’s party (PP) – has sought to blame Spain’s socialist government and even the armed forces’ military emergencies unit (UME) for the disaster and the delay in relieving it. His administration, meanwhile, stands accused of waiting almost 14 hours before sending an emergency alert to people’s phones last Tuesday.
“There’s so much confrontation and so many tensions among the politicians here,” says Loles. “The PP here seems to be dead set against anything the Spanish government does. But they should have been united at all levels.”
Loles Ferrer, and her sister, María Jesús. Photograph: Sam Jones/The Guardian
She and her sister would also like to see less finger-pointing and more discussion of the role the climate emergency played in the disaster.
“The politicians need to stop shouting over the climate scientists and not recognising what’s going on,” adds Loles. “Nothing like this has ever happened here. Our parents used to talk about a flood in the 1940s, but that was nothing compared with this. And it doesn’t help that they’ve built new places so close to the ravine.”
The scale of the crisis is evident well beyond Valencia. The motorway into the region is beaded with the green Jeeps and trucks of an army logistics brigade, the red-and-yellow vehicles of the UME, and a small convoy of white Madrid city council rubbish trucks with cranes. Closer to the city of Valencia, the roadsides are lined with mud and mutilated cars and its endless industrial outskirts are water-logged and patrolled by police and bands of broom-wielding volunteers.
Standing in her clinic and listing off the damages – the destroyed ultrasound machine, the lost patient records – Vallés says the impact of the floods was increased by the number of cars in the town and by the fact that the gully was full of tree branches and reeds. In the past, she adds, people used to keep it clean to ensure that heavy rains did not inundate Chiva.
She, too, is sick of the political bickering even as people in the town are still assessing the damage to their lives and livelihoods and architects are arriving to see which buildings will need to be torn down.
“I don’t think this is the time to assign blame or to insult people,” she says. “All the politicians are the same to me, left or right, but we need to find solutions after so many people have lost their lives. So I’ve lost my business but it’s just a business and we’ll open up again. We haven’t lost anyone. The important thing now is rebuilding.”
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