For a Christmas story, complete with frosty weather, a feast, gifts, royalty, floods, animals, and innocent children, all swirled together, let me go back two months, to the last weekend in October. On the morning of the 27th, a Sunday at the end of a week of unusual cold in Spain, I ran a footrace in León, the province directly to the south of Asturias. A frost had fallen in the night, and at 10:30 a.m., it was still chilly enough that I shivered at the starting line. Oh, for warmer temperatures! It was cloudy. The sun did not shine, but at least the weather was dry, and eventually the day warmed up, the beginning of nicer weather.
A week later, on Saturday afternoon, I was again south of the mountains that make a barrier between the province of Asturias and the rest of the country. This time I was in Zamora, again primed to run a footrace, but the weather couldn’t have been better: balmy day, no clouds, clean air. Really wonderful weather, especially because after the race, the village was putting on a buffet-style dinner for several hundred villagers and race participants. Chestnuts were roasted over a bonfire and offered before the awards ceremony; afterward, everyone lined up for a bowl of stewed meat and potatoes ladled from enormous vats. Some people wandered away looking for a rock wall to sit on, others ate standing up. Desserts were passed around. People mingled. The fire burned on, no rain to hinder it or dampen the fun. How glad I was that no inclement weather had interfered with my day—not with getting to the race, running it, or enjoying the celebration afterward.
But the weather was on everyone’s mind that Saturday because four days earlier, on Tuesday, lingering cold air across the country met warm, moist air blowing in from the Mediterranean, creating a cloud that detached from the weather around it. This kind of formation is called in Spanish a dana, from an acronym for the atmospheric conditions that produce it. Besides carrying enormous amounts of moisture, the cloud can settle in one area and remain for several days, producing torrential rainfall. In this case, the dana wreaked havoc on the coastal areas of the autonomous community of Valencia for 24 hours, causing the worst flooding in 100 years. Twelve inches fell in some places in eight hours. Homes were inundated and at least 223 people died. At the starting line, we runners observed a minute of silence for the victims.
In the aftermath, people reproached the government for not giving warning of the dana. Along the Mediterranean coast, where mountains favor the formation of storm clouds, torrential rain is common. And so it might have been difficult to convince the inhabitants that though they have experienced destructive floods in the past, never have they seen the likes of this deluge. But more to the point, because of the erratic behavior of a dana, no one could have anticipated how bad the storm would be. Where the rain would fall, for how long, and how much—all were unknowns. Yet the national weather service had predicted the dana two days in advance, just not the terrible destructive force of this one. SMS flood alerts from the civil protection service did not appear on smart phones until after the waters were already rising.
And yet, with water deepening in the streets, some people left the safety of their homes to go to their cars and drive to higher ground. In a foot of water, wheels will have some traction on the ground, but not much. When water is two feet deep, the wheels cannot grip and the car is essentially floating free, impossible to steer. You have no control whatsoever, and the car goes where the waters take it, faster and faster, to be slammed into whatever obstacle appears in the path of the current. Thousands of cars were swept away and, accumulating around corners in narrow streets or at the pilings of bridges, they soon collected other refuse and dammed the flow, making the flooding even worse.
Other people hurried to underground parking lots to retrieve their cars, only to be trapped there in the flooded spaces that soon filled with mud as well as water. Some people were swept off their feet as they hurried to beat the onrushing water. Some disappeared from their flooded homes.
On Sunday, as I was returning home from the race, I listened to the radio updates about Valencia. The king and queen, Felipe VI and Letizia, accompanied by Carlos Mazón, president of the community of Valencia, and Pedro Sánchez, president of Spain, made the first official visit to the area. Angry protesters, throwing mud and yelling insults, confronted the small entourage, reproaching them equally for failing to give warning of the danger and for the inadequate response to the disaster. The two government officials had to be packed back into their vehicles to protect them from angry citizens. The king and queen soon also withdrew.
Even before the official visits, thousands of volunteers had arrived in the area to help the locals with the cleanup. And yet, several days after the disaster, when the anchor of a special TV report asked a local official what was needed, she did not answer patience, or hope, or perseverance, or better warning systems, or a government that accepts responsibility for errors. She said that towns and villages were still cut off, and many people were still without water or electricity. Yes, they needed water most of all, she said. People had no supplies, no food, and they had no water. Water, she repeated, was of primary importance. As Coleridge wrote nearly two centuries ago, “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink.” As was written more than two millennia ago, nothing is new under the sun. Or in the rain, it seems.
And yet a few scenes from videos shown by news channels stay with me. In one, parents with children they had collected from schools once the danger was apparent wade through water toward their cars. One child loses her grip on a school bag and, as the bag is carried away, the child lunges for it. Her vigilant mother yanks her back. Let it go, she’ll have said. Let it go.
In another, a teacher at an English-language academy is standing waist-deep in rising water and uses a table leg to smash through a glass door so that he and the other teachers can evacuate the students from the rooms where they all are trapped. The children, waiting atop furniture, are gathered up and passed from one adult to the next in a human chain to get them out of the flooded rooms to safety. Another video shows a woman being airlifted to a hovering helicopter. She appears to have gone limp in the clasp of the rescue worker, while cradled in her arms is a small bedraggled dog looking around worriedly in the still-falling rain.
Supplies soon followed the volunteers, more emergency workers came, the army was sent, police arrived, and work was continued. The official answering the question about what was needed apparently didn’t need to add hope, charity, and commiseration to the list, because those feelings were everywhere in evidence—motivating people to pick up a broom and travel to the mud-drenched towns to begin the cleanup, or to hug one another, or, like the father of one of the children saved from the English academy, to return in tears a day later to tell the teacher that he, the father, owes the man his own life for saving that of his child. Without the child, the father said, he had nothing, his life was worth nothing.
The weather service announced the end of the dana on Monday, six days after it began. On the seventh day, though, no rest, just more cleanup, more relief, more tears. The worst flooding in a century, but nothing new.
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