Norberto is bitter. More than bitter in fact. Angry. “They killed them. If we had been alerted to the violence of the rains, if the authorities had done their job, they would still be among us.” Mariano-Brull Street, 200 meters at most, in the town of La Torre, looks like all the others on this Friday. The mud standardized the appearance of the villages, painting everything less than 1.50m high brown. La Torre is a small village of 5,000 inhabitants, four kilometers from Valencia.
On this Friday morning, Mariano-Brull Street, located 250 meters from the Torre AC football stadium, is littered, in front of each building entrance, with chairs, tables, clothes and everyday objects. All of them become unusable and piled up on the sidewalk. Good to throw away.
Volunteers are busy in the street, pushing the sticky muck towards the manholes. Few dare to glance towards the garage of death. It's there, at No. 4, open. Its obscurity now resonates like a gaping wound in common memory. Eight people lost their lives there when the Turia River, north of the city, suddenly burst its banks. On the wall, you can still see the mark left by the water.
“It’s atrocious”
A Spanish police banner bars the entrance. Two firefighters are working around a water pump which is running noisily to empty the basements. From time to time they refill it with gasoline from a bottle, also soiled with mud. On the ground, a gas cylinder and a survival blanket. However, no one ever came out of this garage alive on Tuesday evening at the height of the storm. “It’s atrocious,” concludes Norberto, who turns on his heel to return to his apartment, also flooded, four streets away.
We remember that in 2015, on the Côte d'Azur, a number of people died in their garages, in Mandelieu-la-Napoule in particular (20 deaths in total). This was the case Tuesday evening at La Torre. A dazzling flood. Several people, from different families, then went down into the two basements of the garage at No. 4 on rue Mariano-Brull. Including a police officer from the 7th District unit. He wanted to get his car to safety. Ditto for a couple and their daughter, who did not survive either. While they were all in the basement, the exterior entrance door to the garage suddenly exploded under the pressure of the water. According to the daily The Worldciting witnesses, a woman passing outside was also literally sucked in by the flow as she descended from the garage. She is among the victims.
The bodies were extracted and transported by refrigerated funeral service trucks. “I don’t want to talk about it, it’s too painful,” comments a neighbor, crossing her chest.
