Businesses start to reopen in Valencia after devastating flooding

Some shops and businesses have started to reopen in Valencia’s suburbs, just over a week after catastrophic flooding devastated eastern Spain.

Cafe owner, Pepa Juanes, says she was lucky as floodwaters did not reach most of her appliances.

She has already reopened and will be able to start serving hot drinks to the huge numbers of volunteers helping with the clean-up.

“We’ve been lucky that many of the refrigerators are working. Right now this man just fixed the dishwasher. They’re going to fix the other refrigerator, but everything else works. So we’ve been cleaning thoroughly,” she said.

But others haven’t been so lucky.

“To open I’ll need at least a month or a month and a half, or two months. I mean, we don’t have refrigerators, we don’t have freezers, we don’t have cold storage,” said Ana Lima Atienza, who owns the Divinee Café.

“Today we can at least use the street. People have already started taking all the garbage out there, but this is going to take a long time.”

Unprecedented disaster

At least 219 people have been killed in Spain’s worst natural disaster in decades, after torrential rain battered Valencia at the end of October.

Meteorologists say a year’s worth of rain had fallen on the region in just eight hours.

93 people have been officially declared missing, but authorities admit that the real number could be higher.

Another 54 bodies remain unidentified.

In total, 36,605 people have been rescued, according to authorities.

Counting the cost

The full extent of the damage is unknown, but Spain’s Consortium for Insurance Compensation, a public-private entity that pays insurance claims for extreme risks like floods, estimates that it will spend at least €3.5 billion in compensation.

The consortium has received 116,000 insurance claims for flood damage, with 60% of the claims for cars and 31% for homes.

Spain’s Association of Insurance Companies anticipates the flooding will break a historic record for payouts.

The Transport Ministry has so far repaired 232 kilometres of road and rail tracks but the highspeed train line between Valencia and Madrid is still demolished.

The central government has approved a more than €10 billion relief package for families, business and town halls.

But there’s been widespread criticism that the regional authorities were slow to respond to the disaster and many people were forced to fend for themselves with little to no support from the government or the emergency services.

The emergency operation mobilised by central authorities has grown to more than 17,000 troops and police officers.

The operation includes 8,000 soldiers — 2,100 of them belonging to military emergency units specialized in disaster response — along with 9,200 additional police officers from other parts of Spain.

Thousands of ordinary citizens also stepped in to volunteer, with no definite estimate as to exactly how many have helped with the clean=up effort.