By eleven past eight, it was too late: a chronicle of the Valencia floods
As a resident of Valencia, this is a personally significant translation. The floods on the 31st of October turned my world upside down, and Elena Krause’s article perfectly encapsulates my own experiences, along with those of so many others. It is hard to describe, let alone overstate, the destruction that Elena portrays so vividly here, or the political dithering and finger pointing that came after it, as politicians scrambled to justify the fact that the region’s “civil alert” warning system was not activated until 20:11, when people were already drowning in garages, sheltering on top of their cars, or battling the raging waters to save their loved ones.
I felt viscerally compelled to share Elena’s uncompromising account of this surreal experience. Much international media attention has focused on reporting the facts and figures, but this article captures the human side. It touches on the experience itself and its wider repercussions, both for the Valencia region, and the world at large.
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Today is the 9th of November – eleven days since a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours, burying dozens of towns in the Horta Sud and inland areas of Valencia under thousands of tons of (now putrefying) mud. An unprecedented torrent of water that hit the region like a ton of bricks. What you are about to read is a jumbled chronicle, a cry of grief, a story of loss, of unfathomable terror, of clamorous calls for help, of devastation and death. It is also the story of small, humble people who flocked in their thousands, on foot or by bike (the only reasonable form of personal transport in this day and age), to do everything they possibly could to help their neighbours. However, I want this to also serve as a conduit for a crucial line of critical thought. Three decades into the 21st century, imagining another world, one where life is truly good, is fast becoming nothing more or less than a moral obligation, a statement of absolute humanity.
The 1st of November, four days after the ruthless flood. I get out of bed, spurred by compassion, in an act of love and solidarity, together with thousands of my tenacious, generous neighbours in Valencia. First order of business: get my panniers, check my bike tyres, and offer myself as a packhorse to carry whatever is needed out there, where the mud covers everything.
The towns south of the city are a swamp. Viscous, slimy muck up to your knees, cars and urban debris piled high in the middle of the street, rammed against shutters, or blocking streets and doorways. There is no electricity, no drinking water, and phone signal comes and goes. A horizontal line marking the exterior of the houses leaves a frightful, vivid reminder of how high the water reached.
On October 29th, the first day of the worst “cold drop” rains in a century, a wounded Mother Nature looked upon us with hate and unleashed storm after storm, discharging her rage on Valencia’s inland areas: record rainfall, tornados, and hours upon hours of sharp-toothed rain. An overheated Mediterranean, warmer than ever, formed the epicentre of this rainbomb that ravaged our region. The cause? 422 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the main regulator of global temperature and, in turn, our seas. These CO2 emissions are a sign of our industrial prowess, of the motorised, fossil-fuelled hypermobility of people and goods, of the advanced deforestation afflicting the world. Climate change is not harmless, it is not a theory to be debated around the dinner table. It is the global panorama – one of uncertainty and anguish – in which our lives are taking place.
Wednesday, October 30th, the morning after. Dawn reveals the trail of horror and devastation left by the rivers. The towns south of the city are a wasteland of mud and cars. Cars in the street, cars blocking motorways, in fields, on top of trees and smashed against walls. Cars piled high on narrow streets, blocking the water and making it rise even higher, or turned into battering rams that demolished so many houses. Garages became death traps where scores of people unwarned about the scale of the flood drowned as they went to save their cars. The flood wrenched too many lives from our hands, and the warning that would have saved them was both inaccurate and dispatched too late. Those who survived under the mud will not forgive or forget.
Thursday October 31st, day three. In the lead up to a public holiday, life shuts down in the metropolitan area. Supermarket shelves in the capital are emptied of bottled water, and a stream of people – many of them teenagers – carry big, heavy bottles over the new Turia river bed on their shoulders. Walking along Calle San Vicente, we reach La Torre, where we see a few firefighters, tow trucks, forest rangers, and hundreds of people wading through the muck. As we walk further, mud and more mud; cars piled upon cars piled upon cars. Caravans scattered about, washed away from their parking spots and dragged from side to side like broken doll houses. There’s little that can be done, but people are emptying ground floors of sodden furniture, ruined appliances and mountains of rubble that now mingle with the mud and cars already clogging the streets. On the radio, on TV, in the street, in conversations, on every corner, anguish, fear, missing persons and questions. “I can’t find Juan. Has anyone seen Isabel? We’re missing three neighbours. Where’s my son? He slipped out of my hands.”
The roads into the area known as the zona cero, ground zero, are all but impassable, or blocked by police. On the city’s southern ring road, traffic is in absolute chaos, and over the sound of gridlocked cars and impatient horns you can hear the imploring voices of local police officers telling drivers trying to get into the area “I’m sorry, you can’t get in, the roads are all cut off.” While cars can’t access the southern towns, swarms of vehicles are jostling to get out. The sight of ambulances and emergency vehicles stuck in traffic jams leaves us feeling powerless and claustrophobic. There is something paradoxical about this image: the very vehicles designed for mobility suddenly assemble en masse to trap us in a prison of toxic noise and fumes. You are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.
On the morning of Friday, November 1st, four days after the flood, Valencia’s well-established bike activist network has already mobilised. The bicycle – that great decarboniser of minds – is ideally suited to the task. It takes up no space, causes no traffic jams, makes no noise, and with a few bags, panniers or a trailer, it can carry a considerable amount of cargo. We arrive, like any other day, at the square, the heart of my neighbourhood. The desire to be useful and help has brought us all to that exact place at the same time. There are some familiar faces, and some total strangers – Marysol-illa, Manolo, Rubén, Vitalic, Javi, Elena – with our bikes ready and the entire neighbourhood swept up in an avalanche of generosity that has left the supermarket shelves empty.
We are soon given our mission, a pinch of order to ward off the chaos. Ana and Montse, from the Patraix Neighbours’ Association, ask us to carry nappies, baby food and milk. We have a destination, an objective, and two people, Mariave and Miguel Ángel, awaiting us in Paiporta. We load up our bikes, and our little nappy squad is dispatched. At the Rambleta, on the southern edge of the city, we find dozens of other bike messengers who, like us, will reach their destination with minimal difficulty. Despite the mud, patchy phone signal, chaos on the roads and demolished bridges, we manage to find Mariave and Miguel Ángel at the school in Paiporta and deliver our precious cargo.
I have to take a moment to reflect on our car-addicted society. This is not a question of individual choices, but a structural, systemic dependency. In the province of Valencia alone there are 1,313,881 cars for 2,605,757 inhabitants: one-ton machines that usually transport only one or two people weighing around 70kg each, unjustly occupying 70-80% of urban space and spending 95% of their lives parked. We live in cities built and regulated around a kind of motorised mobility that hinders movement on a human scale, poisons the air we breathe, and contributes to 30% of our CO2 emissions.
Cities tailor-made for cars are, in essence, giant car parks that rob space not only from people, but also from plant life – which cannot grow on asphalt – and by extension from all other living creatures. They also fatally affect the ground’s permeability, with serious consequences for runoff and groundwater. Our cities are not well made – they are dark, grey and polluted. We have subscribed to a social contract that offers up our own health and that of our surroundings in exchange for supposed motorised freedom. The beating heart of a fair, sustainable and decarbonised future is public transport.
Today, with the horror seared into our retinas of hundreds upon hundreds of cars piled on top of one another, we cannot ignore this fact. It is partly because of these millions of vehicles and their emissions that our planet is heating up much too fast. The soot belched out of exhaust pipes is denying countless living creatures any chance of a good life, and cars and asphalt have rendered our cities ugly, filthy and cacophonous.
On the 29th of October, when an unprecedented, colossal downpour caused four rivers and several barrancos to burst their banks, it was cars that formed metres-high dams. Cars were what killed scores of people. Cars blocked access for emergency vehicles and humanitarian aid in the following days, and 100,000 destroyed cars now pollute the Albufera lake, which will take decades to recover.
In the mud-choked streets, looking at one another, we repeatedly said that we were in a war zone. And indeed, what is a flood but the riposte of a river reclaiming its territory? We have long waged war on the planet and on Mother Nature. Every time we build on riverbeds or next to barrancos, every time we cut down trees to make way for asphalt and cement, every time we pollute the air, water and land, every time we insist on squandering the fossils of thousands of buried and sedimented forests by burning hydrocarbons. Every time we forget that the Earth has limits, we renew our declaration of war. As a civilisation, we are deeply, profoundly lost.
To draw things to a close, I would like to come back to November 9th, the eleventh day after the worst flood in a century. We are back in the street, but this time in San Agustín, in the centre of Valencia. Hundreds of us are marching up Calle San Vicente, fuelled by rage, mud and pain, with spades in our hands and mud-caked boots on our feet. This is a massive, emotional, raw and tense protest. Shouts and chants ring out: “Murderers! Criminals! They didn’t die, they were murdered! Mazón out! Eleven past eight, was too late! Mazón was out to lunch while the people were dying”. That evening, 130,000 people flooded the city centre, united by sadness, rage and a bitter collapse of trust in public institutions.
We have witnessed a shameful spectacle, one of infinite, absolutely criminal neglect by the public servants who swore to protect all Valencians and then denied us this right. But what can you expect from a government that opens its legislature by placing emergency services in the hands of the far-right, climate change deniers of the Vox party? Instead of strengthening, equipping and funding the Valencian Emergency Services Unit, these people eliminated it, and now also seek to get rid of the Climate Change Agency, which exists precisely to mitigate and adapt to crises like the floods.
Climate denial is a millstone around our necks. Institutions are made up of people, and people are less rational than they would have you believe. Those who say that green politics are elitist, or that environmentalists are liars, will struggle to lead us in adapting to a changing climate in which these events are increasingly frequent, and much more extreme. Their denial – whether rooted in paranoia or greed – has no place in our institutions, because the enormous task that lies ahead of us goes far beyond reconstruction. It is a task of transformation, re-education, resilience and adaptation, built on the principles of precaution and social protection.
The floods’ destructive power, however, has taught us a valuable lesson: climate denial will literally wrench your children from your hands. The survivors will not forgive, and they will not forget.
Valencia, 18 November 2024
Produced by Guerrilla Translation under a Peer Production License
– Written by Elena Krause
– Translated by Alex Minshall
– Edited by Timothy McKeon
– Header image by David F Sabadell
– First in-text image by David F Sabadell
– Original Spanish language version published by El Salto