The FC Godall drama: "It might take us three months before we can sit on the couch."

Torelló"My car is the one that appears in all the videos: the white Golf with a red car on top. I was just saying these days that it was very clean because it had rained, and look," explains Joan Zaragoza (1993). He is number 10 and one of the captains of the football team of Godall (Montsià), the small town of 600 inhabitants that has been ground zero for the dana that has "devastated" the Terres de l'Ebre, a "catastrophe" of millions in economic losses. On Sunday he was in Godall, at his partner's house, sleeping with The one that is coming in the background. It was raining heavily, and they went out onto the balcony. When he said that maybe he should go down and get the car out, they asked him if he was crazy. There were already two feet of water.

Suddenly, they saw some chairs crash against the car, parked in front of the house. They were coming from the bar in the Plaza Mayor, where a group of old people were playing cards, like every day. First, they climbed onto the tables and chairs, and in the end, they had to open a hole in the wall with a fire extinguisher to escape the water because they were trapped. After a few minutes, the water was already moving the car. It ended up carrying it down the street. They say some cars appeared 300 meters below. "We were there, as if with our mouths open. We were watching the things that the water was dragging from above and how the water level was rising to the street. 'Look, look.' And every look "It was a hand's breadth," he says.

Next to him was Aitor Cardona (Godall, 2002), his brother-in-law and teammate on a team that competes in the Catalan Third Division. He says the streets were "wild rivers." He's 23, but he's been playing for Godall for eight years now and, having recovered in the 90s, he survives with a single team in the penultimate category. "There aren't enough kids to have a base. One year when there were a lot of kids in the town, we managed to put together a youth team. It's been a long time," says Vicent Martínez (1954). It's a family club, with a budget of 15,000 euros: his brother is also on the board of directors, his sister-in-law is the president, and his daughter is the delegate.

Training was suspended on Tuesday: it was time to roll up our sleeves to help. The mud reached the pitch and entered the bar and the locker room, but it's more or less okay because it's on an elevated part of the municipality. Sunday afternoon's match against Camarles had already been postponed in the morning. Fortunately. Because the water even tore the asphalt off the street where the cars are parked. Martínez says that, otherwise, it would have been "a massacre." This Saturday they played at the home of Gandesa.

When Cardona was cleaning the garage at home, he found a photo of a family who lives three streets up. For a long time, he thought that someone he knew had surely died, with the precedent of the Valencia Dana in mind: "It's a miracle." When they finally managed to go down to the street, it was "all mud." "It was like a real movie. It was like a war. Everything dirty, everything broken, full of upside-down cars. The only words that come out are: 'It can't be, it can't be.'"

Kevin Troncho (Godall, 2002), club photographer and board member, was also at home: "It started to rain like I'd never seen before." The ground floor houses the kitchen, dining room, pantry, and a bathroom, as well as the garage. Suddenly, there was a foot and a half of water. He ran up to the first floor to get towels. "I placed them by the door and got on my knees to try to make a barrier to keep out more water. It seemed like a long time to me, but it must have been ten minutes at most," he says. The water kept coming in. Suddenly, his father said it was already reaching the window. "When I heard this, I said, 'Wow, that's it, like in Valencia.' Suddenly, the water from the street hit the door, and he realized there was nothing more they could do.

"It will be difficult, but we will get through it."

They ran up to the first floor and just then felt the water breaking through the windows and the door below: "The door I was holding on to. It was a very loud, brutal, shocking noise. A noise I don't know how to describe, but it represented a feeling of, 'That's enough, let's give it all up.'" Downstairs, the water reached two meters. He began to think they should escape through the second-floor terrace to survive, because the roofs connected. The front door was one of the first the water hit. The ravine overflowed its banks. He says it was "madness."

They haven't been able to "rescue" anything from the downstairs apartment. "We had to throw everything away. From the sofa to the extractor hood. The Christmas dishes, the photos. It hurt me to see the games I played when I was little and we played with the whole family at the dining room table." "If you think about those memories, it's awful. It's the sacrifice of a lifetime," he notes. In the early days, the village landscape was bleak: everything inside the houses was outside. "You saw everyone covered in mud, tired, dirty, with their heads screwed up." He says that if it had happened in Barcelona and not the south, "they would already have custom-made furniture and kitchens," but he prefers to emphasize the "indescribable" solidarity of a people and a land that have gone out of their way to help.

He takes a deep breath and concludes: "I can understand that some people think we've hit rock bottom, but I'm absolutely clear that we'll get through this. It will be difficult, but we will get through this. It may take three months before we can sit on the sofa and watch TV, and if it has to be six months, it will be six months, but luckily we can all do it."