At first glance everything is fine. María José opens the door of her house and invites you to sit in a gleaming kitchen in which there is no trace of the mud. Of the “damn mud.” The light enters the courtyard of the patio. Everything is impeccable and in place. When he speaks, look in the eye and smiles. It is a rare smile, a little melancholic, a little hard, a bit forced. She is a 47 -year -old beautiful woman, with blond curls that fall by her shoulders. He says that before he was fixed a lot for everything, but not anymore, that he does not feel like it. Really, she doesn’t feel like anything. Because, although at first glance everything is fine, nothing is fine.
María José Almazán has not returned to work since the night in which life was turned around in a cold perfume. When it was locked inside the store while the water climbed and climbed with the blind of the street. When he called desperate again and again at 112 without anyone paying attention to him. When he came out for a showcase that thanks to God burst by the force of the current. When he grabbed a tree so that the flood did not drag it. When he was hugging a windshield, knowing that his life depended on managing to hold herself. When some neighbors rescued by raising it with the cable of an extender who rolled by the waist. When the morning spent listening to screams while watching shadows floating in the water that did not know if they were branches or dead …
“You see me now and you may think that I look good, that I look like a hard person … but after what happened I cannot continue with my life normally,” he explains. “I can’t. I survived, but I stayed there. Without anything.
The last six months have been difficult, the Dana left tens of thousands of harmed of all kinds: 228 people died and houses, businesses, companies, cars … and although walking today in these villages shows a reality that has nothing to do with the apocalypse of the mud of the days that happened to the cold drop, there are many people with invisible but very deep injuries.
This report is the story of three of them, only an example of all those who, six months later, are still trapped in the Dana. Amparo Chisvert-Tarazona cannot return to his home of Paiporta, the same in which he was hanging from a door for six hours with his 91-year-old mother trying not The waiting for money that does not arrive and without which he cannot start living again.
Let’s go back a moment with María José. “After the Dana I didn’t realize anything,” he reflects on his dining room. “I was going. The ground floor of my house, where we have the living room and the kitchen, was totally shattered, so I spent a lot of time with my children and my husband and the help of friends and volunteers fixing and recovering everything. We live days without light, without water, eating thanks to the queues of hung To vomit without more.
The day after the flood began to run the bulus for a cold that “the girls of the druni” had died. She was one of them, the store in charge, and that afternoon she was working with three more companions. Each one suffered its own dramatic adventures after the four swimming for the burst. One stayed to a tree and everything that dragged the flood was hitting it for hours. The other two climbed together to another car and ended up rescuing them with sheets from a balcony. But the bully of his death ran like gunpowder causing additional damage. “I met on the street with many people who were surprised to see me alive,” he says. “And sometimes it still happens to me, six months later. I know that they are very happy that it is well, but it is exhausting to give explanations again and again. In these villages we continue without talking about anything other than the Dana, and so it is even more difficult to turn the page.”
María José relives what happened many times without wanting it, because it comes to mind even if he doesn’t want to. Others do it by therapeutic prescription. During these months he has attended numerous individual psychological consultations and the group therapy offered by the City Council of Catarroja, which is very useful because he can share his sensations and fears with people who have gone through similar situations. He also sessions with a psychologist specialized in trauma who are based on returning to those memories, returning to October 29. “I hope it is useful, because I get out of there, exhausted,” he explains. “The only thing I am sure is that it is not my fault to be like this. Everyone processes all this as you can.”
Amparo’s house is in Paiporta, in a small pedestrian street of low buildings in which the day of the Dana suddenly and in a matter of minutes saw gigantic waves appear. The house is still empty. It impresses that six months have elapsed since the tragedy, because it seems that time has not passed. She is 66 years old and lived with her mother, 91. She is the family home of a lifetime. On their ground floor for decades they ran the flowerist of the neighborhood until Amparo’s sister, which was the soul of the store, died of cancer. And there they would probably have dowed Amparo and his mother on the day of the Dana if the roofs were not so high, which allowed them to breathe grabbed at a door while all the furniture of the house floated around them.
The two survived, but their mother left there with pneumonia after having spent hours in that angry water. He never finished recovering, went out and died two months after a heart attack. There are many cases like that, they do not appear as victims of the Dana because they did not die that morning. “My mother was an older woman, but I think her death accelerated by the flood,” says Amparo’s sister, who considers her a hero for having saved her. “Well, at least we could say goodbye to her,” he says with his eyes fogged. “Forgive, I am very crying. But it takes us many hours to know if my sister and my mother were alive or dead. In these streets of Paiporta everything was very hard. He thinks that four people died in this small street, eight people were drowned, eight if we count other houses that are here to the side.”
An rigger tour the rooms while taking notes without stopping. He is also noted in tension. “We don’t supply,” he says. “We have supplies problems for all the houses and commercial premises that must be fixed in the area and a lot of pressure because it has been half a year and we know how important it is for people to return to their homes and their businesses. But we arrive at what we arrive.”
The dimension of the area affected by the DANA is of such size that the terms of the reconstruction are dilated for both individuals and municipal facilities. Amparo now lives with his sister in Mislata. Hope to resume his life in Paiporta at some point, but he has no hope that he will happen until at least the end of the year.
Montañana clothing also has been closed since October 29. As if time had frozen after the mud. Where before they were deployed falleras of colors, dressings, combs or tablets now there is nothing. Only bricks, bags, dressed mannequins, shelves, a work ladder and a lot of dust. The store is on Rambleta de Catarroja Avenue, a street that six months after the Dana is far from reaching normality. There are countless bars and stores still closed to lime and song, empty and with a very present mud. In some areas it still smells like mud and fecal waters.
The Fallera clothing store was managed by Elena’s son and she, 52, worked as a seamstress. The whole family lived from that family business, but for six months they only have the 480 euros of insertion income that her husband receives. “We lost 64,000 euros in material and the place was devastated and with severe structural damage,” explains Elena. “In these bass cars, trucks … of everything. The level of destruction was brutal, but the expert of the insurance consortium made an evaluation by video call and offered us only 35,000 euros for everything. With that we could not reopen in any way, so we resort and we have not known anything again.”
Elena also has to replace the doors of her store. And the parquet, the electrical wiring, the roof, the furniture, the sewing machine, the ironer, the embroidery … “With the aid we have received we have fixed some things, but it is not enough,” he says in the midst of the local spillway. “Money is necessary to resurface psychologically, to start living again. What has been lived here is very hard. We have lost three friends and have seen spooky situations. We need to have emotional peace of mind at once.”
Elena’s store is just 700 meters from the Druni perfumery where María José worked, who is still closed, and very close to her house, where everything seems calm, where at first glance everything is fine … but nothing is fine.
“Sometimes people from outside tell me: ‘Well, what? There you are all well and everything forgotten, right?” She is surprised. “It gives me the feeling that it was Valencia, or even outside our villages, what has happened here has not been understood. We have lived a very deep collective trauma and we will take long to be well. Yes, six months have passed, but no, there is nothing forgotten.”
