Sitting on her father's walker, next to the mud-covered furniture littering the sidewalk in front of her house, Beatriz Frau was staring into space. A week had passed since torrential rains and a huge wave overflowing the Magro river swept through the town of Algemesi, a rural municipality of 27,000 inhabitants, surrounded by orange and persimmon trees, 35 kilometers south of Valencia. Here, as in the rest of the province, where flooding has left at least 211 people dead and 78 missing, a return to normal seems a long way off.

On Wednesday, November 6, Frau finished clearing and cleaning the devastated ground floor of her modest home. The 40-year-old garden center employee still didn't have any electricity and, like the rest of her family, was going to neighbors to clean herself. With her two children, her niece and her parents living with her, she remained stuck in the Raval district, whose streets had been transformed into deep quagmires.

Scheduled to return to work on Monday, she still had no idea how she would even get there. "Neither the fire department nor the military have come here," she said, her face contorted into a grimace. The mayor's office designated the priority neighborhoods and streets," explained an official of the army, who had been deployed in large numbers in Valencia, to Le Monde. The poor, marginal Raval district, with its immigrant majority, on the other side of the disused railroad tracks, had been forgotten or abandoned.

"Apart from the volunteers, no one helped us," confirmed Emilia Saba, who said she was psychologically devastated. To enter the home of this 60-year-old unemployed woman, you had to make your way through mountains of mud and stinking garbage. All around her, a half-dozen young people, armed with squeegees, brooms and masks, were helping her to empty her house of the dirty water-logged furniture, the place where she thought she was going to die on the night of October 29. "The water seeped under the door, then broke a tile and started rising until it was over a meter high. I spent the night perched on a stepladder, with my husband, who is usually on respiratory assistance, while my daughter and grandson climbed on furniture," she recalled.

In the morning, family and neighbors managed to break down the door to get them out. Since then, she and her husband have been sleeping with her sister, her 40-year-old daughter on a mattress on the floor, and her grandson with an aunt. There's nothing left in her home, and the electricity hasn't been restored. "My strength is failing me. My house wasn't insured, so I wouldn't be entitled to any benefits," she added.

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