In Spanish town devastated by flood, ‘the Worst Was to See People Die’

PAIPORTA, Spain — Plates with half-eaten dinners were still sitting on the white tablecloths in the nursing home’s dining hall Thursday, amid muddy and overturned wheelchairs and walkers. Six people died in the facility Tuesday, as a raging river exploded out of its banks and swept through villages and towns around the Spanish city of Valencia, on the country’s east-central coast.

Among them was the town of Paiporta, where residents said the water came without warning. It had not even been raining Tuesday night when the water from the river swept in suddenly.

Staff members at the nursing home tried to move residents to safety on the second floor but did not manage to get everyone, and some of them drowned, a town official said.

The floods killed a total of 158 people in Spain, in the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recent history, with almost all of the deaths, 155, in the province of Valencia. More than 60 of the victims were killed in Paiporta, a working-class town on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia, according to the official, Vicent Ciscar, the town’s deputy mayor.

The body of a teenage girl was pulled out of her parents’ cafe in Paiporta, according to several locals who saw it, and laid with her favorite white shoes in the town’s square in front of a pink church. A few yards away, the bodies of five workers were removed from the Consum supermarket, Sgt. Daniel Álvarez of Spain’s Civil Protection and Emergencies agency said.

Many older people in Paiporta died trapped in their ground-floor apartments. Other people drowned in their cars, which, two days after the disaster, now laid overturned, crashed and piled together amid weeds, like huge dominoes of sheet metal.

“It was like a tsunami,” said Carmen Aviles, 53, who said people put their heads and hands out of their car windows and cried for help as their cars spun wildly like boats adrift in the furious current Tuesday night. “The worst was to see people die,” she said. “It swallowed them up.”

Rescuers in Paiporta were still pulling bodies out of the mud Thursday. First they had extracted the bodies they found on the streets, then those they found in homes.

The rescuers then moved on to garages, where people got caught by the water as they rushed but failed to drive away from the floods in their cars in time.

Firefighters were pumping water out of the underground garage of the Hiperber supermarket Thursday, where they believed they’d find more bodies in the two floors of underground parking, said Alvarez, a diver. “They can be under their cars, inside or outside.”

Sheyla Castillo, who was standing outside the supermarket, hadn’t heard from her boyfriend’s cousin since the day of the flood, when he was walking home from the factory where he worked.

In Paiporta on Thursday, some people cried as they sat by torn down palm trees on a roundabout. Others cried on the phone as they threw buckets of brown water out of their homes. Still others cried as they searched the ravaged landscape for objects they had lost.

Ciscar, the deputy mayor, cried in the town hall, in front of the Rambla del Poyo River that on Tuesday night swelled and swallowed his town.

“Inside the houses there was a lot of wreckage, a lot of mud and a lot of dead people,” he said.

Outside town, the highways were empty of cars but lined with chairs, sofas, doors and overturned trash cans. The orange groves alongside the highways were battered and covered in mud.

Crowds of people were walking away from Paiporta, where there was no running water, food or electricity. Some were fleeing on foot, carrying their pets. Others pushed shopping carts, bearing bottles of water and food.

Virtually nobody in Paiporta had a car anymore. Hundreds of overturned cars filled the town’s streets, so damaged and dirty that it seemed impossible they had only been there for only a little more than a day.

Help was coming, though not nearly as fast as residents needed. Hundreds of army personnel, police officers and firefighters have been deployed to the area for rescue operations, as well as helicopters and planes.

In Paiporta, authorities started distributing food Thursday, the deputy mayor said, and in the city of Valencia, they have been offering shelter to people stranded there.

Aviles ran a shop that the swollen river had swept through. On Thursday, she found some of her hard drives hundreds of yards away.

“We are alive,” she told her neighbor. “But we have lost everything.”

In the neighborhood of La Torre, José Amaro, the owner of a tropical fish shop, was sweeping up with his bare hands the dead fish from the tanks now filled with mud.

“They drowned in the mud,” Amaro said of the fish. “It was my passion for a lifetime and my work for eight years.”

He had been inside when water entered his shop and quickly reached up to his chest. He tried to force open the doors, but he couldn’t at first.

“I thought it was the end,” he said.

Then the glass doors broke, and he could jump outside. But everything else was gone.

In the neighborhood, anger mixed with sorrow as many locals wondered why nobody had warned them about the incoming flood. It did not rain in the area before the flood, local residents said, but in the upper reaches of the river, torrential downpours — a year’s worth of rain in a few hours — caused the waters of the Rambla del Poyo to swell.

“How did nobody tell us,” Isabel Vicente asked. “We are in the 21st century.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.