The flooding in Valencia has been pretty much covered by the international press, such as the BBC but as friends are affected we cannot but mention this distaster in our online magazine despite the widespread coverage.

One friend lives in Paiporta, which was hard hit, but without gas, water, electricity, and thus being unable to charge her phone to contact family and friends in other parts of the country, it brings it home to us that few homes have a landlines nowadays and public telephones are a thing of the past.

The flooding also brings it home to us, or should do, that this sort of thing will be common place and not a once-in-a-half-century event.

In the early 2000s, on the Costa Tropical, we had a flashflood when the two rivers of Almuñécar burst their banks and met in one huge deluge, filling the aqueduct pit in La Carrera with water and huge amounts of debris, including cars.

Had the flood happened less than an hour before, that very pit would have been full of dead schoolchildren from the nearby junior and senior school, caught by the wall of water as they made their way home.

Almuñécar, unlike Paiporta, did not suffer a death toll in the dozens but those who lived in Almuñécar back in the early 2000s will recall how long it took to clean up the streets, tow away the cars piled one on top of the other or washed out to sea.

Yes, the day of a catastrophe; and what happened in Valencia cannot be described in any other terms, is tremendous, heartbreaking and bewildering, yet the days that follow, families will be filing through morgues and trying to get through to overwhelmed hospitals, looking for their missing loved ones, hoping to find them there and not in the former.

And for those who can count themselves ‘lucky,’ having lost nobody, many will have to deal with their businesses – those which put food onto the table – completely destroyed.

The lyrics of My Fair Lady saying, The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain, ring hollow to us, as today and in our near future, the rain in Spain hardly ever comes, but when it does, you might wish it hadn’t.

(Editorial: Paiporta, Valencia)

Reader’s comment: “My heart goes out to the people in the Valencia province and also in Alora in Malaga
who have lost their loved ones and also the sheer terror of witnessing such awful weather.
I lived here in September 2007 when the region had severe flooding. I remember collecting
my son from junior school in Almunecar and driving back to La Herradura in the most
terrible conditions I have ever witnessed. Hail, wind and torrential rain. It was such a relief
to safely get home. If I remember correctly, the African mainly Senegalese community were
unsung heroes in the cleaning up process.” – Julie

Editor: you are right. We ran an article at the time on how they were the first to react, and off their own backs, whereas many residents were waiting for official help.

I asked one of them why, if they were treated so negatively by locals, they were doing this and he replied, “In my country the government does nothing and it is up to locals to help each other; today for you, tomorrow for me.” It is sad that this attitude has disappeared from the UK and fast disappearing here.