Bahía Blanca merchants struggle one year after historic flooding devastates businesses

A year has passed since the water came to Bahía Blanca, and the city's merchants are still counting what they lost. The flood arrived on March 7, 2025—a Friday that split the year into before and after. For Sergio Martínez, owner of IndusWhite, a printing operation in the port district of Ingeniero White, the sequence of that day remains vivid. He and his wife Claudia fled their home in Punta Alta that morning, desperate to reach their business thirty kilometers away. The route was cut off. They didn't arrive until Saturday.

When Sergio finally saw his shop, the water had already receded, but the damage was total. The flood had reached fifty-five centimeters—high enough to destroy the motors on his machines and leave piles of corrugated cardboard scattered across the floor. The work stopped for two weeks while he and his team assessed what could be salvaged and what had to be replaced. What made the blow harder was the timing of his debt. In 2016, Sergio had taken a loan in the United States to buy a Japanese offset printer with six units, a machine that cost $350,000. He had finished paying it off just three months before the water came. Now that machine runs, but not at full capacity. A system was lost in the flood, and replacing it would cost between $20,000 and $25,000—money he doesn't have. So his team does the work by hand now, manually setting the printing measurements, paper thickness, and other specifications that the machine once handled automatically.

To stay afloat, Sergio took out loans from three different lenders. He managed to keep all twenty-three of his employees on the payroll and recovered almost all of his machines, replacing only one with a new unit. But the government relief he expected never came. The municipality of Bahía Blanca announced a tax exemption for businesses that had invoiced less than fifty million pesos in January—a threshold designed to help small operations. Sergio's company, with its twenty-three workers, couldn't possibly reach that number. The flood happened on Friday, March 7. Carnival holidays fell on Monday and Tuesday. He could only invoice on Wednesday and Thursday. With minimal sales that week, he still had to pay gross income tax and municipal fees as if business had been normal. Now those deferred taxes are coming due with interest added on. "I'm struggling," he told reporters. "Sales aren't helping either. We're in low season, but it's too quiet. There's an economic downturn across the country, but here you feel it much more because of what happened."

Not all merchants have managed to keep their doors open. María Graciela Arguile ran a shoe and clothing shop on the same street for twenty-eight years. A year before the flood, she had already decided to close. She couldn't make the decision then, but the water made it for her. When she finally reached her shop the day after the flood, there was no electricity and the scene was chaos—shoes buried in mud, a meter of stagnant water in the storage room and bathroom. "It was very shocking," she said. "There are many people who ended up very badly. You live it every day here. Many people ended up in a bad psychiatric state. You feel a little breeze and you're already afraid." She spent twenty days cleaning the shop, arriving at five in the morning and leaving at six in the evening. A year later, she is exhausted and ready to sell.

In the center of Bahía Blanca, along Alsina Street where the municipal palace stands, the damage was visible for months. Merchants dragged salvageable clothes and shoes onto the sidewalk to dry in the sun, but passersby began offering money to take them away. Stores put up signs reading "Total liquidation due to flooding" on windows shattered by the water. The mud inside had swallowed inventory from the lower shelves. Now the mud is gone, but its marks remain on some walls. The broken glass is gone, but cracked display windows remain. Some merchants lifted their floors and installed new ones. Others painted and refinished their shops.

Those who survived did so by selling what they could recover. Luciana Gili, an employee at Victoria shoe store, remembers arriving at work that Sunday to find water everywhere. She and her coworkers spent fifteen days selling salvaged merchandise on the sidewalk, trying to raise enough money to pay salaries and repair the shop. At Mundo Outdoor, another affected business, partners like Néstor Zennaro loaded twelve trucks with wet merchandise to be washed and then sold at cost. Even at cost, they lost twenty to thirty percent of their inventory—goods that were destroyed couldn't be recovered no matter the price. One of their other locations was closed for two months while they rebuilt. Sales have been weak all year. Father's Day brought a small uptick, but nothing compared to previous years. The broader economic contraction across Argentina has made recovery harder. A year after the water receded, Bahía Blanca's merchants are still waiting for the year to feel normal again.