Mud-caked volunteers clean flood debris in a Spanish town as authorities
struggle to respond
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[November 02, 2024]
By JOSEPH WILSON and TERESA MEDRANO
CHIVA, Spain. (AP) — Mud cakes her boots, splatters her leggings and the
gloves holding her broom. Brown specks freckle her cheeks.
The mire covering Alicia Montero is the signature uniform of the
impromptu army of volunteers who, for a third day Friday, shoveled and
swept out the muck and debris that filled the small town of Chiva in
Valencia after flash floods swept through the region. Spain's deadliest
natural disaster in living memory has left at least 205 people dead with
untold numbers still missing, and countless lives in tatters.
As police and emergency workers continue the grim search for bodies,
authorities appear overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster, and
survivors are relying on the esprit de corps of volunteers who have
rushed in to fill the void.
While hundreds of people in cars and on foot have been streaming in from
Valencia city to the suburbs to help, Montero and her friends are locals
of Chiva, where at least seven people died when Tuesday’s storm
unleashed its fury.
“I never thought this could happen. It moves me to see my town in this
shape,” Montero tells The Associated Press. “We have always had autumn
storms, but nothing like this.”
She says she barely avoided the floods when she was driving home
Tuesday, and that if she had got on the road five minutes later she
believes she would have been swept away like dozens of cars still
stranded on the highway that crosses a flood plain between her town and
the city of Valencia, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the east.
Tractors roar through Chiva's narrow streets, only briefly stopping or
slowing to allow people to toss broken doors, shattered furniture and
other debris into the beds before churning their way up, away from the
epicenter of the destruction.
Residents and volunteers meanwhile shovel and sweep out the layers of
mud that coat the floors of the ruined shops and homes, the air abuzz
with frenetic energy. People carry buckets of water from a large
ornamental pool in a town square to wash away the mire. Three young boys
take a break to kick a soccer ball around on the slippery street.
Newcomers are easy to spot because they are clean, but a few steps down
Chiva's slippery cobblestones and they are quickly marked with mud.
“How many hours have we been at it? Who knows?” Montero says, while
taking a breather from cleaning near a gorge that was filled with a
crushing wall of water just days earlier.
“We work, stop to eat a sandwich they give us, and keep on working.”
Death by mud
“As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from
the face of the earth,” is Charles Dickens' description of 19th century
London in his novel “Bleak House.”
In Chiva and other parts of Valencia — Paiporta, Masanasa, Barrio de la
Torre, Alfafar — mud has become synonymous with death and destruction.
The mire flowed into houses and crawled into cars, smashing some
vehicles apart and easily lifting and moving others.
The storm this week unleashed more rain on Chiva in eight hours than the
town had experienced in the preceding 20 months. The deluge powered a
flood that knocked down two of the four bridges in the town, and made a
third unsafe to cross. The waters have now receded and the Civil Guard
divers are gone, but police keep searching the gorge, smashed homes and
underground garages, concerned that the mud could be hiding more bodies.
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People clean mud from a shop affected by floods in Chiva, Spain,
Friday, Nov. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
“Entire houses have disappeared. We don’t know if there were people
inside or not,” Mayor Amparo Fort told RNE radio.
Citizens fill the void left by authorities
There are so many people coming to help the hardest-hit areas that
the authorities have asked them not to drive or walk there, because
they are blocking the roads needed by the emergency services.
“It is very important that you return home,” said regional President
Carlos Mazón, who thanked the volunteers for their goodwill. The
regional government has asked volunteers to gather at a large
cultural center in the city Saturday morning to organize work crews
and transport.
Electricity was at last restored for Chiva’s 20,000 residents on
Thursday night, and there is still no running water. Local
governments have been distributing water, food and basic necessities
in towns across Valencia affected by the flash floods, and the Red
Cross is using its vast network of aid to help those affected.
In Chiva, the Civil Guard police officers have been searching
collapsed houses and the gorge for bodies, and directing traffic.
Firefighters are helping ensure buildings were safe. Some 500
soldiers have been deployed in the Valencia region to deliver water
and essential goods to those in need, and more are on the way.
But so far no military units are in Chiva, where the wave of
solidarity among average citizens underscores the dearth of official
help. The vibe is one of townsfolk just getting on with it.
A man weeps inside the Astoria Cinema, which has been transformed
into a supply depot. The theater is filled with piles of water
bottles and fruit. People make sandwiches. One group of young men
arrive and drop off bottled water before picking up shovels and
brooms and joining the fray.
Just across a square at the town hall, a sign says everyone is
allowed to take two bottles of water a day. Volunteers hand out
baguette sandwiches.
Cleaning out the bakery that has been in her family for five
generations, María Teresa Sánchez hopes it can survive, but she is
not sure if her 100-year-old oven can be salvaged.
“Chiva will take a long time to recover from this,” she said. “But
it is true that we have not felt alone. We are helping each other.
And at the end that is really what we embrace, that spirit of being
a town that is isolated and nobody has come to help, yet see how we
are all out in the street? That is the shining light to this story.”
___
Medrano reported from Madrid. Associated Press writers Colleen Barry
in Milan and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
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