Rescuers in Paiporta, where more than 60 people died, were still pulling bodies from the mud. “We are alive,” a resident said. “But we have lost everything.”
Plates with half-eaten dinners were still sitting on the white tablecloths in the nursing home’s dining hall on Thursday, amid muddy and overturned wheelchairs and walkers. Six people died in the facility on 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 on 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, said a town official.
The floods killed at least 205 people in Spain, in the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recent history, with almost all of those deaths, 202, in the Province of Valencia, the authorities said on Friday. 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 residents who saw it, and laid with her favorite white shoes in the town’s square in front of a pink church.
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 lay 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 on Tuesday night. “The worst was to see people die,” she said. “It swallowed them up.”
