Valencia: Recovering from the floods
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Fear and terror were etched in the faces and heard in the voices of thousands of people who at the end of October last year in the Spanish coastal city of Valencia were caught up in severe flooding following heavy rains.

In less than 24 hours, over 200 lives were lost. Infrastructure was damaged to the tune of $3 billion and over 600,000 businesses either destroyed or damaged.

Hello, my name is Ashish Sharma and in this edition of Business Daily, I've been back to Valencia after the floods caused by the extreme heavy rain known in Spanish as Adana to look at how the region has been recovering. Some businesses have bounced back, like the IMAC Group, which provides materials and solutions for the construction industry.

We maintained the full team, we didn't have to release anyone and we wanted them to keep the jobs. Others have struggled though, and especially small traditional family businesses, many of which have turned to crowdfunding to help finding ways of continuing. A friend of mine has been searching the cases and get them in an Instagram account that is Dana Pai Porta, so people can find the different initiatives to help people here.

The floods also caused environmental damage. We'll look at how the waterways have been cleaned up to ensure the safe production of rice and citrus fruit, the main agricultural output of the region. All that to come in Business Daily.

Well, when I came about six months ago, I wandered into this place of IMAC, the warehouse, and it was pretty messy. I've got Emi Boisch, the CEO of the company, who very kindly showed me around last November. Emi, it looks like a completely different warehouse today.

Yes, everything is a little cleaner than it was before. Well, we finally cleaned everything. So we had to repolish and clean all the machines and make it work again. It took much more time than we wished. The problem was that if we couldn't recuperate the machinery...

the investment would be very, very high for us. Maybe inaccessible. We are a very financially healthy company and we could keep going and try by our own funds and of course a little aid that we receive.

But, Amy, also I remember you telling me that you're the president of an association of family enterprises. These are smaller companies, perhaps don't have the resources like IMAC. How difficult has it been? Have you had a lot of your sort of, I suppose, colleagues contacting you saying we're in big trouble?

Yes, actually I'm the president of IBEFA, for the Family Owned Business Association here in Valencia and Castellón. And I have been in touch with so many associated companies.

What seems to be the problem? Well, the insurance companies are not responding. A lot of companies have not been receiving the insurance.

that they were supposed to or at least they counted on. Six months on and a third of commercial enterprises in the Valencia region are struggling to get funds either from the government or from insurance companies. It's impacted Pipa's Bruken, featured in this report made by local TV. Now we're going to do the part where the pipe is cut off.

Where the forage is, where the tobacco is.

A family company formed in 1914, they make pipes for smokers. The wood used in pipe making comes from the briar tree, which is a native to Valencia. Bibas Brucken are the only company in the world that carries out the whole process, from sourcing the raw material to making the final product. Yet despite its uniqueness and international reputation, David Obrer, head of production, says they're struggling to continue.

The damage was done to all our machines. That's about 60 machines approximately. We had a high insurance premium, but because everything, and I mean everything, was damaged as a result, we've ended up with being underinsured. And obviously, in the end, that will come back to penalise us the moment when everything has to be paid for.

How much money do you need from the insurances to get back on your feet? To start with, I think we need about 300,000 euros at least, because it's all the machines and the warehouse itself, all of it. Everything has been lost. The only solid thing we have is that we can continue in the location where we first started.

We've been based in our village for over 100 years and we're able to find another base to continue from, but we can't pick up in the other locations because we just don't have any money. How much money can you get back from the insurance companies? Well, about half of what we need to fully restart, and that is not the amount we had insured.

I think we'd insured about €600,000 in the whole building, but that means everything, so it includes what makes the final product and what makes up the machinery. But I think they will only give us about €150,000 at most. The government has said that it's going to put a lot of money to help companies. Are you able to...

apart from insurance claim to get money from the government to help you? The first help we received came a few days after the Dana and was from a donation by an individual businessman of a very well-known company here in Valencia, which was 8,000 euros. And then later we received from the state government around, I think it was 10,000 euros of help. And yes, also from the Generalitat, the government here in Valencia, who also gave about 10,000 euros, but that's it.

With that and with our own effort and in our time, we've been able to recover machines and part of the production. You're listening to Business Daily with me...

Thank you.

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One of the flashpoints of anger after the Dana floodings was the lack of information provided by the Valencia government, which failed to send alert warnings to people to get back home. As deaths mounted, the king and queen visited the town of Paiporta, regarded as the disaster's ground zero. They came to show support, but instead were pelted with mud and abuse.

This is the main square here in Paiporta and all this playground to the kids it was destroyed the

I met Marta Chico on my last visit in November, just after the Dana. She responded to the project by the University of Valencia to save people's photographs. Marta lives in Paiporta. Her house was covered in two meters of water and everything was ruined. But the repairs are going well. I received a lot of help from my friends and volunteers that came in the second or the third day.

It was full of volunteers, the street. My family and I have asked for every help possible and we haven't received anything from the government yet. The money we have received

Marta contacted me recently to say that many crowdfunding projects had been started by families trying to save their businesses. She's helping her uncle, an artisan skilled in making saddles and decorative uniforms for horses.

He failed to receive insurance compensation due to wrongly signed documents and has had to give up his career. Me personally, I've received the money of the insurance, but my uncle, his workshop...

He isn't going to have any help by the government and by the insurance. A little bit, but not enough. So the money I can search, I'm looking for is to help him because he's in a situation, a very difficult situation, like other people here in Paiporta. How big is this crowdfunding? How many people are being helped as far as you know?

We have our crowdfunding to help my uncle, but there are lots of them here in Paiporta. There are some cases of people that haven't got enough money because they are not going to receive any help for the government or for the insurance, or they couldn't pay insurance. There are

You can probably hear behind me there's a digger that's furiously digging up soil from the dried up riverbed. Further down there's another one that's picking up

I don't know what I was going to say. Me neither.

Maria and her sister Charo set up the nursery school Pato Mama, which means Mother Duck, over 30 years ago. It was the first opening by Porta, and such is its link to the area that today, 30 years on, one of the very first children who attended now brings his own children, or should I say brought his own children to the school.

Maria, Charo and some of the teachers showed me around inside the building. It's been completely rebuilt after it was flooded and left with knee-deep brown sloshy mud everywhere. The sheer amount of assessment work being carried out by insurance companies means they were only appointed an assessor in mid-March.

But the sisters can't bear to give up on their whole life's work and so have started the reconstruction from charitable donations and their own savings. The school employs 11 teachers for whom the uncertainty is holding up their future. My name is Naira Servan. The school is not paying us because they are not able to pay us because we are not working, so that's...

That's it. And government is supposed to help us because we are in ERTE right now. ERTE, you'll have to explain what that is. Yeah, I know. ERTE is a kind of situation in Spain when you are not working because something has happened, in this case with the weather. So the government has to give you some money each month until you are working again. But we are not earning our full salary.

So we are actually earning 400 euros less from April. We are going to earn the 50% less. That's it. And survive. Do it. That's it.

We are in this situation until the school is open again. What happens if the school can't open again and they don't get the money that they need to rebuild? What happens to you and your jobs? I suppose that they have to say it's over, so we are not going to earn anything. We have to go to the government with the situation and they have to pay us and then start again, looking for a new job, anything.

Actually, I feel more confident because I know they are trying to open again and I can see with my eyes that it's working. So it's like, OK, I'm going to earn less. But in the future, I'm going to work again and I will continue with my life and I will be in the same point.

Help, though, has been at hand. Much like volunteers who turned up with spades and buckets, the wider business community in Valencia and Spain has also been helping. Bindi Abbasandani works for the Association of Valencian Enterprises, AVE.

an organisation which includes over 200 leading companies in the Valencia region. Their mission is to elevate the contribution businesses make to a local community based on social economic development and social progress. Sorry, because I'm... Yes, it's that...

We launched in November in 2024 with the help of three leading Michelin stars, Ricard Camarena, Begoña Rodrigo and Quique da Costa. Our whole objective was to foster economic recovery and support local entrepreneurs...

freelancers, small businesses and local stores that have been heavily affected by Dana. The core of the initiative was organizing over 30 charity dinners at both national and international level with the help of over 200 Michelin stars.

and their teams. There was like a minimum price ticket of 500 euros per attendee. With all this, we were able to raise 6 million dollars. The focus is not so much in the amount that we raised, but the overall response of this joint initiative. Local businesses, entrepreneurs, business organizations, community leaders, and different well-known companies that all got together for one cause. What was the criteria for

for choosing the people that get the help and how much would they have gotten? So we're talking about helping small companies who had up to 10 employees in a revenue of maximum 2 million, say 2.5 million dollars and which would have probably never opened their shutters again had we not been able to distribute this money. So we give them a financial support up to 10,000 euros.

Another major area of concern was the environmental impact. Chemicals, oils and toxins entering the waterways.

Citrus fruit and rice production are the main agricultural activity in Valencia. Andrea Rico, a distinguished researcher in biodiversity from the University of Valencia, says unlike the economic sector, action has been quick and effective to rid the soil and water of dangerous pollutants. These pollutants have increased the environmental quality standards set by the Water Freightway Directive.

So there are some concerns that they may have some impact in the long term. What is the information that you're giving to the agriculturers about the situation regarding the toxicity of the soil? What we know for sure is that there's an increase of plastics in the soil in some areas.

also some pharmaceuticals because there was a discharge. So there has been quite some work to try to remove them from the soil bodies. It's quite time-consuming and expensive because you have to go one by one. It's not completely clean yet, the area. A bunch of fields that have been

let's say, really polluted. For those not sure what they will do this season, I hope they wait a little bit to plant the rice and they make sure that it's safe. I mean, in the beginning, the priority was to save lives and infrastructures and clean some areas.

Now we have some projects that are set up by the regional government to do a continuous monitoring for the whole year, for 2025, to get a whole diagnostic report by the end of this year to understand what has happened in terms of toxicants, but also impacts on agriculture, on fish populations. I would say now...

has been some recognition of these issues. More than six months on from the effects of the Dana, and it's clear to see that the Valencia region is still recovering, especially for small businesses with one-third still not able to operate. But then, given the amount of damage that took place and the number of businesses and artisans impacted, it's no surprise that many are still looking for financial resolution.

While the government has repeatedly said help is on its way, in the meantime, people are helping themselves and helping each other. Impotence is the word. You can't do nothing. The only thing we can do is help each other, but citizens helping citizens. I hope you enjoyed listening to this edition of Business Daily, produced and presented by me, Ashish Sharma.

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