Valencia is suffering
I haven't seen many people talk about what happened in Valencia here on tumblr, and I want to share what's happening because I have friends and friends of friends that were directly affected by the catastrophe.
On October 29, Valencia was affected by a meteorological phenomenon called DANA in Spanish, I think it's called "cut-off low" in English.
It flooded the streets like I’ve never seen happening here in Spain before. The water swept cars, trash bins and trees all over everywhere. Many people have gone missing, some of them are believed to still be under ruins or trapped in tunnels, and there are hundreds of deaths.
The streets of Valencia are dirty with stagnant water polluted by trash and animal corpses, many houses and infrastructures have been affected and people are in need of clean water, food, clothes, electricity and meds.
The weight of solving this situation has fallen onto the citizens. Politicians are doing nothing to help, and are making progress harder in my opinion.
Meteorologists had warned that the situation was going to be dangerous four days before and advised people to not go outside. The government of Valencia is the one that has the responsibility of declaring the alarm and halting laboral activities, but they didn’t do that until it was like six in the afternoon. Many died because businesses and companies threatened their employees so they went to work when there was hell outside.
The government of Spain could have done something when they saw how everything was going down, but they decided to play by the book, wash their hands, and act like they have nothing to do with this situation.
Now, days after the DANA, political parties are using the situation to promote themselves. The government of Spain in general is ruled by a centric-left wing party while the government of Valencia is ruled by a right wing party. The right-wing party is pointing at the central government saying it’s their fault, trying to distract people from the fact that they are the ones that had to do something in the first place. The central government decided that it was a good idea to send the president to the disaster zone dressed in a suit and accompanied by a lot of police officers when everyone is asking for help from the authorities and public services. He left the place with some stains on him, people were understandably angry.
For some reason, outside help is also being denied when it’s clearly needed. Here I want to thank the French for sending help nonetheless.
I hope things get better with the efforts of everyone here.
