Flood stories from Picanya

It was getting dark when we boarded the Picanya metro replacement bus, but there was enough light to see the fields of cars piled 4 and 5 high in fields near Paiporta. You can still see white bits of clothing and paper scattered about, sticking onto small trees and broken branches, left there by the raging waters. Unfortunately the bus was going too fast for shooting photos. On the walk into the center of Picanya from the bus stop, this being further away from the Rambla than the center of town, there was little sign of damage other than undamaged cars had obviously been driven on muddy streets, their windshields splattered, their tires terracotta colored, the paint badly in need of a wash.

We were on our way to see the youngest children of Picanya sing seasonal songs, starting in the center of town at the Centro Cultural. They wore traditional outfits, and were accompanied guitars, bells and a dulzaina, a traditional instrument in the oboe family. I called it a ‘squeaky’ for obvious reasons- they are not easy to listen to. Once we walked out of a concert where there were twenty of them. Insufferable. But here they fit in, part of the culture.

We went to a second location with the the children (they sang at 9), an ancient convent’s garden, then made our way with our friend M through town, first for a coffee at one of the local bars. They serve coffee, beer, wine and the like, as well as various pastries and gelato with loudly colored ice creams under glass at the entrance. Then we walked through town to M’s house across the Rambla del Rozo, the artery for the flood waters. In town you can see the high water mark at around waist level. Many structures with ground level installations, apartments and businesses, were still closed, but the bars, hairdressers etc are up and running.

As you approach the Rambla the streets slope downwards to where the pedestrian bridge once was. It’s laying on its side, replaced by a temporary pedestrian bridge installed by the army engineers. A smell of rot is in the air. Photos of volunteers and soldiers are attached to the fence. The Rambla, once lushly vegetated, including a tree from which I once pulled a few ripe figs, is now stripped of everything green and gone is the waist high wall that kept people and their cars from going over the edge and down the 10 meters or so to the bottom of the normally dry gully.

There were 11 deaths in Picanya. One was a young woman who was found between cars. Apparently she was carried there from Chiva. A young man survived after being whisked downstream from here to Paiporta, a distance of about 2 kilometers, a bit over a mile. He beat the odds, didn’t he.

We went inside M’s house. A temporary plywood doorway was installed to replace the large heavy door that the flood had ripped from its hinges. Inside on the ground floor there was a half meter/18″ of mud that relatives shoveled out. They cleaned and disinfected everything. The ceramic wall tiles are largely intact, with just a few broken ones. The hallway was flooded to some two meters in height. The garage door was ripped off. The car was pulled out, floated to the corner, where it took a left, went a block and parallel parked!

M had .experienced six or seven floods in this house, where she’s lived for over fifty years, and her parents before that, but never anything like this, including the disastrous flood of 1957 that led to the re-routing of the Turia River. Without that re-rerouting, Valencia city would have been a huge disaster area, the streets around our apartment surrounded by waist deep water and a half meter of mud, with many times the number of ruined cars.