There are thousands of them. Probably tens of thousands, in reality, across the Valencia metropolitan area, in an impressive citizen movement. Volunteers equipped with brooms, shovels, rakes, buckets, bags… came on foot from areas of Valencia preserved by the wave which swept through the region on Tuesday October 27, killing 211 people, according to the latest provisional report. .
On one of the bridges which crosses the deadly “barranco”, the line of walkers did not stop for hours, an immense and silent parade of concrete solidarity. Many of them have gone shopping and are bringing what they can carry – water, canned goods, blankets. The day before, regional authorities had taken the decision to ban traffic in the affected areas for several days. The influx of volunteers had blocked the movement of emergency services.
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The regional government – widely criticized for having issued too late an alert on the day of the flood and for its lack of organization since the start of the crisis – requisitioned dozens of buses to transport these thousands of volunteers gathered in front of the hall of the City of Sciences and Arts in this district of Valencia with contemporary architecture built in the old bed of the Turia, and which was spared by the wave.
Cemeteries of automobile civilization
Students, retirees, executives, workers, families, groups of friends waited a long time – sometimes more than four hours – to get on the buses. “Many have loved ones who have been directly affected but that is not the subject, we come to help everyone, no one in particular”testifies Maica Fuertes, 58 years old, health assistant, accompanied by her daughter, while waiting for the shuttles. The line still represented several hundred meters at the end of the morning even though the buses had not stopped going back and forth.
On site, in an incredible crowd, the volunteers, sometimes helped by farmers who came to the city with their tractors or construction companies with their machines, helped the residents to empty the cellars, the parking lots, the storerooms of the shops, the ground floors. ground floor of dwellings. The construction site is immense. In the urban communities of Alfafar and Benetusser, the streets are littered with debris of all kinds that must be extracted from buildings, collected and then loaded into trucks. The volumes to be recovered are considerable. The first town has nearly 22,000 inhabitants, the second around 16,000. The same scenes took place in Catarroja, Massanassa or Paiporta, other riverside towns very hard hit by the wave.
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