There is something haunting about the city of Paiporta, a place that still lives with the scars of disaster and the trauma of terrible suffering.
Dozens of people have died here and yet we are only a short drive from the third largest city in the world Spain. If wealth and history had been a shield, Paiporta should have been safe. Instead it was vandalized.
We meet Juan, whose father and mother shared a comfortable apartment in the city. The day it started to rain, his father, Enrique, went to the parking lot to move his car.
His wife followed him and was just left behind. That brief gap between husband and wife would change their lives.
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Enrique walked to his car and noticed that water was already starting to collect in the parking lot. When Juan’s mother reached the parking lot door, she couldn’t push it open because of the pressure of the water on the other side.
She called her husband to explain and Enrique told her that some neighbors were meeting in the parking lot and that she didn’t have to worry about him.
But instead he would end up inside with the water rushing in. Enrique died in the parking lot.
“He was the leader and I was so proud of him,” says Juan as we meet in Valencia. “I could see the disaster. When I arrived with my brother, I saw the water in the parking garage rise to 1.70 meters high. I went to my father’s house and my mother was still waiting for my father.
“I went back to where I could see the water – there was a lot of mud. I shouted ‘Enrique, daddy’, but nothing. And I think no… I want to think it happened quickly. I could see then that it was impossible for me to do anything.”
Juan called the police to ask for help and to have specialist machines enter the car park. He says the person on the other end of the line laughed at him, told him the service was overwhelmed and said, “You think I can do magic?” before hanging up.
Instead, he spent four hours filing a police report and then waited days for his father’s body to be recovered.
“I want to say that no one helps us. Only the volunteers. Time and time again they help. But the professionals, the politicians – after, during, later… no. Are they human?”
Juan is now trying to gather testimonies from others who have lost family members and will push for a full investigation into why the response to this disaster seemed to be so slow.
“All we want is the truth,” he says. “We’re going to do everything we can to get to the truth. We want justice. We just want that. The people who are guilty… if people like this stay in the same place, they won’t learn anything.”
Juan’s pain is the searing pain of the relatives, and you see it echo through Paiporta. When so many people have died in such a close-knit community, almost everyone knows someone who has suffered a loss.
But more than two weeks after these floods, there is still a gnawing emotion: lingering, chronic disappointment and anger toward those who were supposed to handle a crisis like this. With politicians, police and army, who seemed to take a step back and leave the people to their fate.
When I first came to Paiporta, I met Cristina Hernandez on the street. She, like so many other people, was trying to cope with a scared family, a damaged home and the fear of chaos and looting. She said the town felt deserted.
Now things have changed. Not only is her house habitable, but there are military vehicles driving through the city, part of a concerted effort to get Paiporta back on its feet.
“I feel like we got the response very late,” she told me. “We should have been helped earlier because when the army came and they were organized, we could see how quickly they could work and how quickly they could help. But we were abandoned for four or five days. For many people it was too late. and for all the neighbors here.
“I’m trying to be optimistic, but it will take months, maybe years, for Paiporta to get back to the way it was. Everyone knows a family that has suffered, that has lost someone. It’s a small town and everyone knows each other, so we grieve for them even though they’re not our family.”
Time heals, of course. But it will take a long time in Paiporta. A lot of healing is needed.