“IT WAS A normal Tuesday, we often get Orange and Yellow rain warnings,” Kilkenny woman Gabrielle Tallent tells The Journal over the phone from her in-law’s home in Aldaia.
Between 9pm on Tuesday night and 7am the following morning, Gabrielle and her family lost their house and their car to the devastating floods that overwhelmed the province of Valencia.
To date, 213 people have been confirmed dead in the disaster. Nearly all the deaths have been in the Valencia region, where thousands of security and emergency services frantically cleared debris and mud in the search for bodies.
Describing “the worst natural disaster in the recent history of our country,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it was the second deadliest flood in Europe this century.
Gabrielle is originally from Kilkenny, but moved to Aldaia in Valencia in 2008. Her husband is from the area, and they have three young children – aged four, six, and eight.
On Tuesday, she and her husband had received word of rain warnings, and put their children to bed and waited for the rain to fall. She described a frequent tendency for the area to experience tropical rainfall, which they were well accustomed to.
“And then my husband’s dad called him and he said, you should put the things up on the table, because it looks like there’s a lot of water coming. And then we looked out the door and we saw a sheet of water, like a wave, I guess, just coming up the street,” she said.
Her husband quickly took action and brought their children, one by one, across to their neighbour’s house, which was better protected from the floods.
When he brought their second child over, a pallet floating in the water hit him in the leg. Coming back to bring their third child over, the water had already risen significantly.
“My son was standing at the door waiting for him to come back,” Gabrielle said. ”I was with him, and his wellies were filling with water. So the water was up to the height of his wellies that was in six minutes or something, it was insane.”
Once the children were safely next door, she and her husband took efforts to place electronics on higher surfaces in their house for protection.
“When I think about it now, it’s so stupid,” she said ruefully. They took their cat and climbed stairs at the back of their home that lead to an upstairs storage area, where they then climbed across the roof to reach their neighbour’s house.
The family’s house and car, like many others in her village of Aldaia, have been destroyed. They are now staying at her in-laws’ house, which has luckily not been affected by the floods.
And yet the area has not received the attention or appropriate response from the authorities, she said. They did not receive warning of the floods approaching the area, a theme that has been reported by others across the country.
“I never got [an alert] on my phone, but my husband did get a warning saying get up high,” she said, adding that the alert came in just before 9pm. “The water was already half a meter high in our house at that stage.”
In the wake of the floods, the community has banded together to offer support and volunteer the clear debris on the muddied streets, but military attention has been focused elsewhere.
“I just ran into my neighbours, and they lost their house, and they’re sleeping on the floor. The floors are destroyed with mud, and this elderly couple are sleeping on the floor. They have no mattress. It’s just heartbreaking. We got a blow-up mattress for them for last night, and we got one single mattress for them for tonight. So we’re just trying to locate another one.”
She told The Journal that despite the devastation caused to the area, and the lack of warning given, she and people in her village have not been approached by any military or any official body at all.
“There are still piles of cars everywhere. We don’t know what is at the bottom of those piles and who is in there.”
She said that the hope is that authorities will begin to engage in the village and help facilitate the massive clear-up operation that is currently being lead by “amazing” volunteers, who have done “Trojan work”.
Communication lines remain down for many in the area.
Gabrielle said that she and her family felt blessed, and have been “so lucky”, despite losing their home and car, and that others have fared much worse. However, the experience has been “surreal”.
“From 9pm when it started to like 7am when I walked out the door of the neighbour’s the next morning, there was just a before and after. When I walked out the door, it was just apocalyptic, is what I would say, it was like from a movie. It was a movie.
“And to be honest, the first few days, I was living in a movie, because it’s just surreal. I woke up the next morning, I was like, did that happen? And, yeah, it still happened.”
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