From early Friday morning there was a constant march of people crossing the bridge from Valencia city to La Torre, one of the neighbourhoods devastated by the worst floods to hit Spain in recent history. People were carrying water, food and other supplies, as well as shovels and sweeping brushes.
Many areas south of the city, particularly Paiporta, bore the brunt of the floods earlier this week which left more than 200 people dead. A year of rain fell in eight hours on Tuesday night. Water rapidly rushed into ground-floor apartments, homes and businesses, killing people who could not get to higher levels, or others in the cars as they tried to flee.
In La Torre, which is separated from Valencia city by the Turia river, people were slowly emptying out the contents of their destroyed homes on to piles in the street, often one muddy bucket at a time. Outside one house a little girl was playing with a toy pram, wheeling it back and forth in the mud as her father and a friend worked through the wreckage.
Turning down side street after side street, there was the constant sound of shovels and brushes scraping and sweeping mud and water from homes. When people did not have brushes or other tools, they used long planks of wood to try to push the water from their house to the street.
Jorge Martinez (22) was helping to clean out his grandmother’s home, which was completely flooded. “It’s very difficult, people you know have died. Everyone who lives on the ground floor has lost their houses and things. It’s going to be a very long time until everything is back to normal,” he said.
The tragedy is Europe’s worst weather disaster in five decades, with the death toll likely to rise as search efforts progress into harder-to-reach areas in the east of the Spanish region.
“The first day, on Wednesday morning, I saw the bodies of two people I knew, it’s terrible,” said Kevin Asensi. The 36-year-old grew up in La Torres and still lives in the area. “We received an alarm on our mobile phones ... but the water was knee-high on the street.” It was obvious the emergency alert issued by authorities had come too late, he said. Many people had died inside their homes, some whose bodies had likely not yet been found, he added.
Asensi was speaking as he swept muddy water from the front of a centre for people with disabilities, where his mother works. “I’m here trying to help the neighbourhood, because they need help and only the neighbours are helping, not the government. I don’t know why the army is not here, we need the soldiers.”
Cars, some with their windows smashed in, lined the roads. In the back and front seats there were items from day-to-day life, such as water bottles and children’s lunch boxes, which now seemed alien or useless.
Rebecca Fortea (24) had been working in her uncle’s pharmacy in the nearby neighbourhood of Alfafar when the water started to come through the front door of the shop. Initially they threw towels down around the door, but 10 minutes later the water was rushing in. “We had to escape with just a bag of our stuff,” she said.
Fortea said another woman – a total stranger – took her into her apartment, where she slept that night. “I had nowhere to go, they didn’t want anybody to stay in the streets,” she said.
On Friday she had spent much of the morning trying to find food and water to bring back to Alfafar for her cousin who had a young baby. “Now I have to walk back another two hours, but it’s okay, at least I have the food. We are fine, we are alive,” she said.
[ How could so muck rain fall in such a short space of time?Opens in new window ]
In Paiporta, one of the hardest-hit areas, where at least 45 people were killed, the mud was still knee-high in places.
David Abasolo, a 44-year-old father of two, was collecting his children from school when the flood happened. “People started to cry ‘Water is coming, water is coming’. We ran home, I put the car into the garage and the water started to rise,” he said.
He then thought it might be better to park the car on the street rather than the garage, but only got to a patch of olive trees 200m in front of his house before changing his mind. At that stage the water around him was rising rapidly and cars were crashing on the street. “I left the car there and I ran to my home,” he said.
Mr Abasolo said his family spent the night in their apartment on the third floor. None of them slept much, and his nine-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter were terrified.
Like many others, he is frustrated with the slow pace of the official response. Instead of authorities such as the army or fire service, ordinary residents and volunteers are leading the clean-up. People work in groups to push the mud and water down into storm drains in the middle of the roads.
The streets are still littered with cars that had been thrown around by the flood water, some blocking roads. “There’s no organisation, we need heavy machinery,” Mr Abasolo said.
Hundreds of volunteers from Valencia city, which was unscathed by the floods, came by foot to the impacted areas in the southern suburbs to help. Some handed out food, sandwiches and water, and others brought shovels and brushes to help move mud from homes and paths.
In one instance food was delivered in shopping bags attached to a long rope to elderly residents on the second and third floor of an apartment block.
Mario Real, a 26-year-old football coach from Valencia city, said watching the images of the destruction on the television had been heartbreaking. “You see all the people dying, the things being destroyed and you can’t do anything,” he said. This is more than we expected. It’s kind of difficult to understand.”
He spent Thursday at his father’s construction business that had been destroyed by the flooding, and on Friday was helping clear out a friend’s flooded home. “In Spain we have a good mentality and now we are working, from the first day we are working,” he said.
“We have not been affected, so we are just trying to help,” said Belen Gomez, a 23-year-old woman from Valencia, talking as she walked across the bridge to La Torre.
Lide Crespo, a master’s student in Valencia, also came down from the city to help. “It was strange at first because we were in Valencia and everything was normal, so we didn’t understand. Then the videos started showing up in the group chats, then we started to freak out and realised that it was really a serious thing.”
She had walked to Paiporta with a friend to help shovel out muck from strangers’ homes: “We came here and we started helping ... We knew we were going to be shocked but when we came it was even worse than expected.”
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