“Nothing can be done about the water when it falls like this”

José Luiz Cambronero counts out loud. “Four, five, no six, with the lady over there. » These are the dead on his street. His neighbors swept away, crushed, crushed, drowned by the wave of water, mud, wood, metals of all kinds, household appliances, stones, concrete blocks, pieces of tar and cars which swept over the city of Paiporta (Spain), 25,000 inhabitants, on the night of Tuesday October 29 to Wednesday October 30, causing immense damage, killing at least 62 people in the town, or nearly a third of the total victims recorded in the Valencia region (155).

José Luiz Cambronero is 66 years old and has never experienced such a desperate situation. He himself escaped at the last second. He was with his daughter and his two grandchildren aged 7 and 10. The water, which rose in a few minutes, blocked the doors of the houses from the outside. The adults in the family made a chain to carry the children, take them out of the window and reach a neighbor's slightly higher window. Those who had steel security gates on the ground floor were unable to get out. Nor the overly old people, who are numerous in this town in the southern suburbs of Valencia.

The results are terrible at the scale of the municipality and the agglomeration. It is also provisional – on Thursday afternoon, bodies continued to be taken out of basements and garages while dozens of missing people were still recorded by the authorities. Some of them may have been dragged to the sea.

But it is a miracle, in reality, that the human damage was not even heavier. The violence of the flood caused by exceptional rains upstream, the power of the waters which tumbled from the hills, the height of the wave, which reached two meters across the entire city, could have carried away even more people.

The inhabitants speak of acts of courage and all those lives which hung by a thread, a rope, an outstretched hand, an open door. Vicente Carrion, 35, another resident of this cursed street in this cursed city, was on the phone with his wife, who was driving their 6-year-old daughter. Their car began to be swept away by the waves, Vicente ran, swam, holding on as best he could and reached the vehicle, broke a window, pulled out his wife and their daughter. They were able to take refuge in a building.

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