He has a sad look. Restless hands move restlessly, as if their fingers are about to trip over each other. These last few months have been difficult for Miguel Asensi Bou, who once again had to take three pills for anxiety every day. The Valencian, born and raised in Alfafar, can no longer live there. His health worsens when the rainy season arrives in this flood-hit Valencian town. He only begins to feel like himself when he goes to Ciudad Real to live with his son. In the city of La Mancha he can go out for a walk, play in the square with his grandchildren and pick them up from school. In Alfafar he tries. He tells himself he can, even if when he opens the door and sees the house across the street, where his mother died on October 29, 2024, everything collapses around him and he has to go back inside. Cases of acute and post-traumatic stress in areas affected by damage have grown by 170% in the past year, according to the Ministry of Health in October. The only solution for some of its inhabitants is to leave their home in an attempt to forget the trauma.
Three weeks ago, when Dana Alice swept much of the Valencian Community, Miguel had just returned from a season in Ciudad Real. That night at his house he heard the thunder of the storm. Anxiety wouldn’t let him sleep and he began to prepare everything in case water got in. The next morning he took the car back and went to Ciudad Real again. He returned to his Valencian city to attend the state funeral and some neighbors, who did not know that his mother was one of the 229 people who died, offered him their condolences. “It made me feel down, you keep reliving what happened over and over again. You can’t get it out of your head,” he says.
His plan is to move, but he is looking for a house near his son’s. “And look, for me, Ciudad Real… I’m from Alfafar. I know the neighbors who saw me born and raised in the same street, but I know that Ciudad Real will not be flooded,” Miguel says.
One of the Spanish regions with the largest extension of areas at risk of flooding is the Valencian Community, where according to the Amnesty International report around 600,000 people live in areas at risk. It rains in the wet, it collects a statistic from the Ministry of Ecological Transition. It is highlighted that all the houses in Paiporta and Catarroja, 16,775, are vulnerable to future flooding. Rosalba Yonda lived in one of these houses, a farm in Siete Aguas, 50 kilometers from the Dana ground zero. Their home was near a very small river that they were excited about, but that day it turned into a tragedy. “We had to escape… It’s a miracle that my husband and I are alive,” she says.
Since then the nightmares have been constant, to which were added the difficulty in sleeping and the skin rashes because the shower water was dirty. Her niece, who lives in Madrid, visited them two months later and, as soon as she saw her, told her she couldn’t continue there: “This is not life,” she said. Rosalba decided to leave her job as a waitress in a local restaurant and move to the capital with her family to be able to start from scratch. “My body shakes a lot every time I remember what happened and when it rains I get very scared and anxious,” he says, his voice cracking. “I don’t think I can live in the Valencian Community anymore,” he says.
The director of the Regional Mental Health Office of the Ministry of Health, Bartolomé Pérez, emphasized in an October press conference that post-traumatic stress manifests itself late and usually presents after six months with strong symptoms. Mental health patients at Ground Zero grew by 3.5%, and there was a marked shift in diagnosis patterns as acute and post-traumatic stress skyrocketed in those cities, compared to 2.3% in the rest of the community.
In Alfafar the radio plays at midday, the streets and houses are still under construction to rebuild the town. About six houses on the avenue perpendicular to what was Borja Chirivella’s house are about to be habitable again. He lived with his wife and three children for almost nine years in a house destroyed by the flood. “Every morning I sat in my bed and thought: this is a nightmare, look how things are going,” says the Valencian. They thought the best thing for the children was to remove them from that scene of horror. “We couldn’t live among so much dust, humidity and sadness. The atmosphere was extremely sad,” he says.
The decision was almost immediate. They couldn’t stay there. “At first you’re in shockthen you are very supported by all the volunteers who came. But it happens and you end up in the shit”, Borja is honest. In October, the Save the Children organization shared the results of a study that collected the testimonies of the little ones. 24% of them continued to have sleep problems and more than 30% said they were afraid of the rain.
Borja’s children woke up at night screaming and having nightmares in which they saw their parents leaving on a boat and not returning. They found an available house in El Perelló, a town on the Valencian coast, and did not hesitate to move. “It was a totally opposite environment to what was in Alfafar. We were calmer because it didn’t feel like a war scene,” he says.
The rains and floods caused by Hurricane Alice in October have revived fears. Save the Children warned in June that 93% of the region’s children would be affected by at least one extreme climate event a year, making the Valencian Community the fourth most exposed region in Spain. Every natural disaster has immediate consequences and secondary consequences that are equally or more harmful. The former are easy to see, like the destruction left by a flood, the latter a little less. It is the emotional wounds that force people to leave what they love most, their home, to find some peace. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, by the end of 2024, approximately 3.5 million people worldwide had been displaced by floods.
Although it’s not always so easy to find another place to put down roots. Paco Sánchez has lived his whole life in Picanya, but the trauma of the flood, added to the “psychosis” that is created every time it rains in the city again or the alarm goes off on cell phones, pushed him and his wife to move. “All the houses we are looking at are high-rise apartments. Although we are afraid of moving to an area of another Valencian city that has suffered damage and is now being renovated. I know people who have changed apartments and still have flooding.”
