Water and People are Unstoppable
After flash flooding left 21 people dead and among mud and debris in outskirts of Athens, the days after are shaped by grief and solidarity.
Photos: Gerasimos Domenikos / FOS PHOTOS
With photographer Gerasimos Domenikos we arrived in Mandra in the early hours of Saturday morning, after four days and nights of torrential rain that left 20 people dead. Two people remained missing, and more than 1.000 households and hundreds of vehicles and businesses are destroyed. Just one hour after dawn, the tension in the small rural city is remarkable and obvious: as obvious as the fatigue in the eyes of those who lost their properties. They haven’t slept over a few hours during the last four days of lethal flooding. The flooding is one of the worst disasters to have hit the Athens area in decades, which Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras acknowledged by declaring a day of national mourning.
Grief, disappointment and indignation — not necessarily in that order — combined with the grey atmosphere of the cloudy skies and the debris around create a bitter sentiment: so bitter that each sunny intermission between the storm that offers the opportunity to retire, but even for a few minutes it makes no sense. The mud around brings harsh reality crashing back. Catastrophe.
How the Town Hall becomes the heart of a town in emergency
While we were there, the Civil Aviation Service brought food into aluminum boxes, and volunteer lifeguards distribute the portions in plastic bags. The Town Hall is stacked with groceries donated by area supermarkets. Behind the Town Hall, local youth and girl scouts are storing pallets with bottles of water and putting vegetables in bags for distribution.
We speak to Deputy Mayor Pericles Rokkas, who constantly drives a pickup truck around the municipality scanning for municipal infrastructures in need of immediate repair and helping the rescue crews. Mandra’s poor infrastructure had made it the target of European Union funds to build a new drainage network for Mandra, but the construction had not begun before the flooding.
A veteran geology professor blamed Wednesday’s deadly flooding directly on ill-advised man-made interventions such as houses built -illegally- on cemented river banks, stressing that “nature had previously issued a warning over today’s tragedy”.
Despite the panic, he offers to take us a tour to witness the extent of the damages. During the tour,is phone rings constantly. He has worked 24 hours a day since the flooding began. He points out that more than 1,000 homes have been damaged and are not repairable.A well dressed older gentleman wearing a red anorak with an Olympiakos F.C. logo carries a notepad in his left hand and his phone in his right, talking to a municipal employee about a truck that Olympiakos F.C. is sending to Mandra with emergency supplies. Another football club that ranks among Greece’s oldest clubs, AEK F.C. has taken the initiative to lower the ticket price for one of their next matches to 5 euros with the promise that all profits will be allocated to the families of those affected by the disasters in West Attica.
Cars from all over Attica do not stop coming to the City Hall of Mandra to offer everything they can. In non-typical Greek fashion, no one complains about the slow pace of the verylong stream of cars. In the rear seats between carton boxes filled with clothes, toys and blankets,children’s faces peer curiously at the small town of Mandra. Among these cars are Roma people driving around at low speed. “Get lost!” some residents are shouting. “They have come here to steal what’s left,” someone tells me. The truth is that so far only four Greeks have been arrested for trying to steal a fridge. Looting is been a major concern for local police officers, who have instated constant patrols around the town.
People over properties
Residents are struggling with brooms and hoses to clear their properties of tons of mud, water, and debris. As the death toll continues to rise, no one wants to talk about the material destruction before the deceased are buried. Despite the devastation and the huge numbers of the destroyed households and businesses, everyone is thinking about those who drowned while trying to escape or those who died while trapped in basements.
We meet the owner of a completely destroyed restaurant in one of the main streets of Mandra. “Fuck the damages, we will build everything from scratch for one more time. But how can you bring back twenty people?” he wonders. This is what most of the residents think silently, grief is more powerful than the frustration of losing everything. And almost half of Mandra’s residents lost all they have been creating for decades.
While we are in the destroyed restaurant, he brings food and coffee to the Pakistani volunteers ordering more food from a nearby restaurant. As he serves them, we read online that the coast guard has found two more bodies drifting in the Gulf of Elefsina, which bordered the flooded industrial districts to the south.The number of the dead so far had ascended up to 19 persons. It will ascend even more.
The “Rubber boot war” and solidarity
Mandra looks like a bombarded area, and during the last few days an unusual war has been quietly waged: “the rubber boot war.” The locals queue for rubber boots and raincoats that are distributed for free by the municipality. The number of rubber boots distributed, however, is not enough to satisfy everyone’s needs. “There is only one size, and this is 38,” they complain.
“Thank God there was a private initiative to provide us with water,” says a pensioner. Next to the pensioner, another old man wearing a raincoat with the logo of a big private company talks about the authorities’ absence. “Only firefighters and the Special Unit for Disaster Response have helped us,” he says. The fire department said it received more than a thousand calls for help, and its crews have rescued more than a hundred people trapped in vehicles and homes.
Dozens of volunteers, along with the Central Union of Municipalities of Greece (KEDE), NGOs, rescue teams, boy and girl scouts, and friends and families of the residents are helping in cleaning up the mess.
As you can see in the video above, we followed a group of Pakistani migrant workers, members of the Pakistani Community “Unity” who voluntarily offered the help to Mandra’s flood victims. In contrast to other groups, they did not offer symbolically old clothes via post but they went on the ground with shovels cleaning the mud off Greek houses.
Around half of these migrants have lived in Mandra for more than ten years, and three of their houses have been seriously damaged by the floods. They have come to the rescue, offering help to their neighbours and fellow citizens whose lives have been hit by natural disaster.
In the beginning, this migrant rescue force faced racist comments by some locals, but they were quickly offered coffee and food as soon as the locals realized their intentions to help.Unfortunately, the floods did not manage to erase the Golden Dawn’s racist graffiti against refugees and Albanian immigrants off the rural town’s walls.
An Albanian family that has been living in Mandra for 27 years explained us us how racism has persisted after all these years, and how it has seven been reinforced by the disaster. They have not been offered any help by their neighbors as they sleep on their rooftop and try to keep their old family photos from wearing off.
Refugees in their own houses
At the climax of the refugee crisis of 2015, some people on the islands began saying that no matter what happens, “people and water cannot be stopped.” In a very ironic way, what happened — and is still happening — in Lesvos has also happened, is happening, and will unfortunately continue to happen in Mandra. In both places, poor people are drowning as a result of the deadly negligence of the state’s authorities and politics. In the same way that Mandra’s residents are stacked in defective infrastructures and blamed for the damage, others are stacked in rubber boats and blamed for trying to escape a war.
Mandra is home to people who mostly make just enough of a living to barely survive. Houses of more than two floors are rare, and most of them are old. Mrs. Marina has seen Mandra overflow six times. She is 58 years old and has spent her whole life here. “I’ve never seen such a disaster,” she tell us.
Everyone here isusing the word “tsunami” to underline the water’s impetus. This is not not necessarily an exaggeration, as what happened is the phenomenon of flash flood: when after a heavy rain, the ground creates large holes in which big amounts of water are kept.
Sun and rain do not always create rainbows
While everyone knows that locals risked their lives to save their neighbours and fellow citizens, no one knows whether people in Mandra have opened their doors to the victims. We see many closed, empty stores with tags writing “FOR RENT” on them. Eventually, a cruise ship docks in the nearby port of Piraeus to provide housing for those left homeless.
People are angry with the government and especially Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who visited Mandra the third day of the floods having a look only at the “gas stations,” an area out of town, the residents say. “The repair of damage and the compensation of victims is a commitment of the premier and as soon as we assess the damage we will make the appropriate announcements,” he said, adding that this will be done in coming days.
Government spokesman Dimitris Tzanakopoulos announced emergency aid for those affected, including a tax-free benefit of 5,000 euros per damaged household and 8,000 euros per damaged business.
The locals are very kind and open to us and explain everything about the situation, asking for their anonymity. Like the majority of Greeks, they are skeptical of the media, criticizing “TV channels who only care to show tragedy and misery.” We are being invited in (what is left of) their homes to shoot video and take pictures. They themselves object to being photographed, however, because they are covered in mud and feel physically and mentally exhausted. It makes sense. Dogs pose happily for us. They look a lot like the people around here: thirsty, tired, and covered in mud.
People may not want to show their faces, but they want the public to know about the extent of the disaster. They feel forgotten by the government and want the public to be sensitized towards them so that the current wave of solidarity is extended.
We stop at “305,” an old military camp where trucks unload tens of wrecked cars, while army cranes line them next to each other so that their owners come find them. “Before you came there were families hitting their heads because they lost both their cars and others who lost their sole old car in the flood.” Until now, there are around 100 destroyed cars, and the trucks keep on bringing new ones. “There are very few that are insured,” say the officers.
While rescue crews complete their mission, the people of Mandra are slowly beginning to measure the damage and fearful questions are arising. Will such a disaster happen again? When will the reparation funds that the government promised arrive? Did nature avenge us for building on top of debris and blocking a river? Is climate change to blame? Is the story of Mandra an allegory for the history of our country Greece? Maybe, yes, and everything should be rebuilt from scratch, this time with real blueprints and lots of solidarity.
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