Screams heard as elderly drown in retirement home during flash floods in Spain

Residents of Paiporta, five miles south of Valencia, recount the terror and chaos of the deadly deluge

The elderly residents of the retirement home in the Spanish town of Paiporta were sitting down to dinner as a light rain pattered against the windows.
They ate and chatted as usual, thinking that the worst of the storms in the Valencia region may pass them by.
But then a torrent of water suddenly broke through the facility’s perimeter wall, surging through the gardens and into the dining hall.
Panic broke out as the flood waters rose quickly from the feet to the knees and then above the chest of the 120 residents, many confined to wheelchairs.
“I could hear people from the residence screaming ‘help, help’,” Marisol Lara, a 62-year-old Paiporta native told The Telegraph on Thursday through tears.
Six pensioners drowned in the chaos, all reportedly aged between 70 and 80.
In total, 45 people lost their lives in Paiporta, a tightly knit town five miles south of Valencia, with at least 158 deaths across the country in the worst flash flood for decades.
As was the case throughout Spain, rescuers were unable to help because of the force of the floods. The barranco del Poyo, the banked-up river that runs through the town, turned from a trickle into a roaring deluge just below Ms Lara’s windows.
While the rain had been light in Paiporta, in upriver towns like Chivas, more than a year’s worth of rain had fallen in just eight hours.
“There was nothing anyone could do from my building [to help the elderly],” Ms Lara said. “They were on the other side of a massive torrent. I felt so impotent when I heard those cries.”
On Thursday, the challenge was just to survive, Ms Lara said. No supplies had reached the town by late morning and looters had stripped the shops of food and water, taking advantage of smashed-in store-fronts.
“The authorities are not here – not the mayor, no one,” Ms Lara said, carrying empty plastic bottles in her hands as she joined a long line of people queueing for water spewing out of a broken pipe.
Denis Borisov, another resident seeking water in the mud-covered landscape of wreckage and turned-over cars, justified the looting.
“Everything has been taken but what are people supposed to do?” said the Bulgarian father of two, who has lived in Paiporta with his wife Anita Marinova since 2014. “We’re going to stay with people in Valencia because this place won’t be fixed for a year.”
Adding his voice to furious criticism of the delayed warning message sent out by the Valencian regional government, Mr Borisov continued: “I was caught in the street when the water started to rise as I moved my car and I had to get on the roof of a friend’s house.
“That was when I got the alert on my phone – the water was already several metres high.”
Susana, who survived the flood in her second-floor flat with her three-year-old son, cried with relief when her cousin Inda Massó arrived from Valencia on his bicycle with fresh water and supplies.
“There is no electricity or water and they haven’t sent troops in to help,” said 43-year-old Mr Massó.
“Our priority is looking for the missing who are still alive,” Emilio Argüeso Torres, the Valencia region’s deputy interior chief, told The Telegraph from a makeshift command centre on the edge of the flood zone.
“We are still finding people who have been in cellars with the water up to their necks since Tuesday,” he said.
On Thursday afternoon, the death toll from the flooding in eastern and southern Spain had risen to at least 158.
The total is the worst on record for Spanish flooding since 1973, when at least 150 people were estimated to have died in the southeastern provinces of Granada, Murcia and Almería.
Mr Argüeso Torres said it remained unclear how many people were still missing.
Those found dead in the city of Valencia, including eight people who drowned in an underground garage in the suburb of La Torre, were on Thursday being taken to a makeshift morgue set up in the basement of the city’s city of justice courts complex.
There, forensic teams worked to identify bodies, taking DNA samples from families seeking their missing relatives.
On the streets of Paiporta, Mati Ribarrocha stared into the mangled ground floor of the building she was born in 75 years ago.
“I was going to mass in San Jorge church right here in the centre, but the priest said best to go home,” Ms Ribarrocha recalled of the start of Tuesday evening’s events.
“We’ve never had anything like this, never,” she said, weeping over the death of a 14-year-old girl who perished in a ground-floor home on the next corner.
Lourdes María García, 34, and her three-month-old daughter were among Paiporta’s dead, washed away before they could be helped to escape from the family car by her husband Toni Tarazona.
Others were luckier. Paqui, who did not wish to give her surname, told The Telegraph how she had stood on higher items of furniture until she perched herself on a high bookshelf in the ground-floor apartment she had shared for 35 years with her Pairporta native husband until he died of cancer in April.
“I don’t understand what happened here. It was a tsunami,” Paqui said, looking down at one of the goldfish from her ruined aquarium gasping for breath in a muddy pool outside her front door.
“It’s because of the ecologists, who won’t let the reeds and plants be cut down from the riverbanks and around the bridges and the water pressure build up until ‘bang’, it surges,” was Ms Ribarrocha’s theory.
According to meteorologists, Valencia is prone to “cold drop” storms, caused when warm and moist Mediterranean air collides with an influx of colder air moving in from the north. The intensity of the rainfall during such events has increased fourfold due to the impact of climate change, according to a study by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
On Thursday, Pedro Sánchez, the prime minister of Spain, told people to follow official warnings because the storms “are continuing” as authorities in Catalonia issued an alert regarding possible floods in several areas.
Juan Ramón Adsuara, the mayor of the Valencian town of Alfafar, criticised the lack of help provided by regional authorities, saying residents were “living with corpses in their homes”.
“They have forgotten us. We have not seen a fire truck in days; we have not seen the military emergency unit nor the Guardía Civil,” Mr Adsuara told the radio station À Punt. “We are getting organised but we are running out of everything.”
Carlos Mazón, Valencia’s regional president, said late on Thursday that he had asked Spain’s government to provide all available troops from the army, navy and air force “to reinforce the logistical effort and the distribution of aid to the population”.
And after further reports of looting, Valencia provincial prosecutor’s office said that it had requested preventive detention for those accused of robbery. “Robberies and thefts are taking place in the face of helplessness of the victims, with contempt for them and an attitude of impunity,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.