DANA In Valencia – Diary of a Volunteer

It’s been six days since a disastrous flood caused by DANA surprised the state Valencia in Spain. Six days since houses were destroyed, and over 200 people died. Hundreds are still missing. What does a small town in Valencia look like after it has been hit by a catastrophe? A volunteer sums it up in their diary.

Diary of a Volunteer in Valencia: Day One

2.11. 10:56
My whole body is aching. Except my head. I took an aspirin last night after I came home. I was in Sedaví, one of the areas in Valencia that were flooded by DANA. My boyfriend’s friend asked us for help. Not for himself though, he and his girlfriend live on the third floor. A neighbour’s garage is full of water. It was a short moment’s notice, I only had one hour to pack water, food, and clothes that I wouldn’t mind getting dirty. On the way I pass a supermarket that’s open despite the public holiday and I buy more food, water and toilet paper. These are the things they asked us to bring. I couldn’t get food for the cats, though. It was sold out. I was surprised to even get water, remembering the day before in the supermarket when all the water shelves were empty. It’s about 60 hours after DANA hit the surrounding towns of Valencia City, and we drive as close as we can. Obviously police don’t let any cars enter the affected areas. After parking, we and hundreds of other people who decided to help walk about an hour into the war zone. I call it war zone because that’s what it looks like. Not like I’ve ever been in one, but I sure as hell imagine it like this. The images in the media are accurate. There’s mud everywhere. Broken train racks. Peaces of trees and plants. Broken furniture. But the worst thing are the damaged cars. They are everywhere. Sometimes two, three, or even four on top of each other. We walk and walk, and it doesn’t seem to end. We have to make two breaks because the stuff we’re carrying is really heavy.

Finally we arrive. My boyfriend’s friend and his girlfriend let us in and serve us food. Although we didn’t know at that moment, we would need the strength the food provides later. First, we just sit there for about half an hour and talk with them. It seems like that’s also some form of help. They want to talk. They need to talk. They share in detail everything that happened. The girl’s parents live in Paiporta, a small town in Valencia, that has been the most affected by DANA. Three quarters of the dead were from there. The TV is running, showing the people in Paiporta who lost everything. They don’t have food, they don’t have water. Not everyone can leave. There are old and sick people who can’t take the long walk into the city. Finally, we’re getting started. The garage is just at the next-door building, and it turns out, it’s not just a small garage, but more like a warehouse size. There’s not much thinking that needs to be done. We get to work. We are four people, but in less than five minutes, we become 20. And each and everyone is needed. People come and go, sometimes we are 50, sometimes just eight, but after four hours of physically very challenging work without a break, it’s done. My body has been aching for a while, but there’s no time to think about the pain. I just keep going. I see many different faces, and I am grateful for every single one of them. Some of them make jokes, and we laugh. Nothing is coordinated, but everything’s working out. No one is thinking, everyone is just doing. You can’t think. Think about how lucky you are living less than three kilometres away and still having a warm home you can go back to after your work here is done. Think about the water coming out of your tab is clean enough to drink, while others haven’t drunk in three days.

It’s getting late and more people are leaving. It looks like it’s gonna rain again, and the temperature is dropping. We finish up and our friend wants to show us his car. We’re tired and hungry, and our bodies are aching. But we go. He tells us that he just bought it two years ago. He’s smiling, but we can see the pain in his eyes. Then we go to a place where they give out food, water and toilet paper. On our way there, we see houses that were flooded, open doors showing broken kitchens full of water. We help the friend carrying the necessities back to his house. They offered us food too but we refused. We don’t need it. We have enough at home, and our grocery stores weren’t damaged. We walk back, it’s cold and we left our jackets in the car. We bring the food and water up to the apartment, and the elderly neighbours thank us for our help. Then we make our way back to the city, joining the hundreds of other volunteers. We can go back home. Others aren’t so lucky.

Day Two of Volunteering in Valencia after DANA

3.11. 21:46
I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel satisfied. I feel powerful. I feel blessed. I feel ashamed. I feel confused. I feel it all. Out there, I don’t feel. I’m a robot who just functions. But once I get home, I start to think about everything I’ve seen. And I’ve seen more in a day than others in a year. Being in the centre of a catastrophe is undescribeable. I’m not even sure this word exists, but it’s the most fitting. Yesterday, we were resting a bit to gain new energy for helping in the small towns in Valencia again. It’s been five days after they’ve been surprised with heavy floods caused by DANA. I admire the volunteers who go out everyday, it’s physically and mentally very challenging. We wake up early today, and although it’s Sunday, we go to a small supermarket that’s open to look for water. As expected, there’s none. So we buy milk and toilet paper. Diapers aren’t available either. Then we collect a friend and take the bus that brings us as close as possible to the affected areas. Our destination today: Benetússer. My boyfriend’s uncle lives there and we want to visit him, bring him food and water and see what we can do to help. Social media spreads the information that volunteers aren’t allowed to enter today because it’s supposed to be raining and too dangerous. We go anyway to find out that this information is completely false. But we can see that way fewer people are here than there were on Friday. Benetússer is more affected than Sedaví, but less than Paiporta, the most affected town in Valencia.

After about 90 minutes of walking, we reach the house. We’re already used to seeing the damaged cars, muddy floor, and broken furniture on the way. His aunt is opening the door, and happy doesn’t even begin to describe the way she looks when she sees us. Someone from outside. We enter, and just like on Friday, first she serves us food and offers us water. The things THEY actually need. When they see that we brought sweets as well, they can’t believe it. What a normal thing in this crazy situation. What a small thing to help someone get through this. We eat, and they tell us the whole story from their perspective. How the alarm came way too late, how it was just about strong winds and how they were hit with full force. While his aunt and uncle made it home in time, his cousin wasn’t so lucky. He had to hold himself onto a street light before he was able to swim into safety. Two hours his parents haven’t heard from him, they even went out looking for him, despite the dangerous circumstances. Only on the third day after DANA flooded their hometown, they’ve started to see helicopters helping. While we sit in their living room and listen to their story, King Felipe, his wife Letizia and the prime minister Pedro Sanchez are three kilometres west of us. They visit Paiporta, and people are throwing everything they can at them. In videos, we hear people yelling at Letizia: “You have enough water, you have enough of everything.” A woman tells the king that they don’t want the resignation of Sanchez, they want him to be fired immediately.
Meanwhile my boyfriend’s uncle tells us that they’ll probably give him 5.000€ for his four-year-old car that he bought for 20.000€. We can see the pain in his eyes. “How will I pay 15.000€?” he asks us. No one answers.

His aunt tells us that they need groceries, but she doesn’t know where to get them, so we tell her there’s a distribution place. We go there and the line is huge. She tells us that we can leave. She knows we want to help, and says she’ll call us if she needs us. So we pick up our shovels and brooms and before seeing where we can help on the street, we visit another friend who lives in the next street. We ring the bell but he doesn’t open at first, so we try the neighbours. Someone opens the door, and we enter the building. On our way up to the apartment, several elderly people are standing in their door, curious to see who came. We ask them how they are, and we can see the pain in their eyes when they answer “ok.” We ask if they have water, they say yes, but if we had some, they’d take it. I can feel that everyone needs help, but no one wants to ask for it. They don’t live on the ground floor, they don’t live in Paiporta, and they feel like other’s are in a worse situation than them. They don’t want to “take” the water from someone who needs it more.

When the friend and his wife open, we talk for a few minutes. Again, they are telling us their perspective. Again, I can feel they all want to talk to someone. Share their story. Process it. They tell us about the water being so high it reached the first floor and a kid they saw being taken by the floods. They saw the girl alive, she was later found dead. No one came to safe her. They get angrier and angrier when they tell their story. How they were being warned too late. How there still isn’t enough help available.

After saying goodbye, we wander through the streets to see where we can help. It’s not exactly a long search. The clean-up progress is very slow due to the lack of manpower and machinery. We help to clean out a small garage for a bit, but when it’s almost finished, we move on. I check a website that volunteers made within days. People who need help can register the location and their phone number on the map, and volunteers can go help. We want to walk to a garage seven minutes away. The website says they don’t know if there are still people down there. On our way, we pass a crossroad that many people are cleaning out. We help a bit but also notice there are enough people here already. So we continue our way to the garage on the map, and two guys join us. When we arrive, there are about 50 people already forming a line to clear the water out with plastic buckets. It’s kind of ridiculous thinking about cleaning out a whole building’s parking garage with plastic buckets. We do it anyway. No one here is thinking. Nothing is planned or organised. We just do. Hours pass by when the volunteers are getting too tired. Conditions are tough, there’s no light in the garage and the floor is so slippery, I actually fell three times. A guy is coming, telling us we should stop because they will start pumping it out now. We check the time and see that it’s already 15:00, the time we wanted to leave because the rain is supposed to start at 16:00 and we still need to walk 90 minutes back. We go back to the uncle’s house to collect our things. He cooked for us but prefers as well that we leave because he wants us to be safe. About 10 minutes later, the rain starts. We walk faster and still make it in time to the bridge. The bridge, that seperates the little towns from the city centre. The affected areas from the non-affected areas. The normal life from the catastrophe. The peaceful from the war zone.

After the bridge, people organised tables where they give out food and water for volunteers. No one accepts it. We don’t need it. We do accept a cookie, though. We need the cookie. We really need the cookie.

Before we get on the bus that brings us home, we enter a café to eat something. It’s more than eating, though. It’s time to talk about what we’ve seen and heard. It’s time to go online and see and hear more. The bus driver refuses the money that we want to pay for the ticket. The people sitting are all offering us to stand up, whether young or old. We decline politely. They thank us. We don’t feel like we deserve it. We’re “just” helping. We still have a home to go to.

At home I need to wash my clothes, shoes, body, hair. It’s been day 5, and the affected areas are infectious now. We were wearing masks and gloves, unlike on Friday. I talk to my flatmate and friend about everything. I need to talk about it. Process it. It’s fully raining now and code red was sent out again in the affected areas. It’s frustrating. I wonder if all the work we did was for nothing. I wonder if all the water we emptied is now entering again. I hope not.

At 20:00 I start hearing a strange loud sound, almost like an alarm. My friend calls me to her balcony. “Karo? This is for you!”. I walk to her to find she’s hitting a cooking pot with a stick. She and hundreds of others in the whole city. She explains to me that this started during Covid to thank the medical and supermarket staff. It almost makes me cry, and I feel so overwhelmed by everything, I’m going back to my room. Why do I feel like I don’t deserve it?

I go online and share my thoughts and pictures. I try to explain the frustration of people. My personal point of view is that it’s easy to say afterwards that people should have been warned earlier, as nothing like this has ever happened before in Spain, no one thought it could. But one thing is for certain: Where is the help? It’s so frustrating going out there on Day 5 and seeing the little progress that’s being made. The biggest problems are the cars. They are blocking entrances and making the clean-up more difficult. We are “just” people, carrying as much as we can. We bring water, food, shovels, brooms and our hands. But we don’t have heavy machinery to remove cars or pump out water. The firefighters and the Red Cross are out there doing their best. We also saw two military trucks. TWO trucks FIVE days after the disastrous flood caused by DANA hit Valencia. Seriously? Where is the official support? We don’t know.

This morning, on our way into Benetússer, a man who lives in the affected area passed us and told us they had just found someone alive. It makes me wonder: How many more could have been safed? How many more are still out there and could still be safed? Why have the European Union and the nearby countries all offered help, but no one is here? Looks like the Valencian government is not accepting help. Then why doesn’t the national government jump in and take action? If the regional government can’t handle a crisis, isn’t the national government supposed to overrule them? Although I know that it’s not the king’s fault, I understand people’s anger and frustration towards him. I’m frustrated. I do what I can, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. I see a video online, a woman is between yelling and crying. She’s desperately telling the camera that if it weren’t for the hundreds of volunteers in Valencia living outside of the affected areas, they would die of hunger and thirst. They have been without water for three days. There are elederly people, sick people, children. It’s not as easy for them to get out as it is for us to get in. And even if they did go out, where would they go? There aren’t hundreds of empty apartments waiting for them.

One thing that makes me happy, though, is the power of people. While the government is busy pointing fingers, we unite to actually help. We care about our neighbours, we don’t want them to die. In Austria, the military is at sight hours after a catastrophe happens. If an area can’t be reached by land, water and food are dropped by air. Every winter, towns are cut off the outside world because of heavy snow, but they are prepared. We’re just a small country with less than 9 million inhabitants. Spain, close to 50 million inhabitants, can not handle a regional crisis. But as my brother said when I recounted my experience to him on the phone: We don’t need the government. We take care of ourselves.