José Luiz Cambronero counted aloud. “Four, five, no six, with the lady over there.” These are the dead in his street. His neighbors swept away, crushed, smashed or drowned by the wave of water, mud, wood, metals of all kinds, household appliances, stones, concrete blocks, pieces of tar and cars that swept through the town of Paiporta, Spain, population 25,000, on the night of Tuesday, October 29. It caused immense damage and killed at least 62 people in the town, almost a third of the total number of victims recorded in the Valencia region (155).

Cambronero is 66 years old and has never been in such a desperate situation. He himself escaped at the last second. He was with his daughter and two grandchildren, aged 7 and 10. The water rose in a matter of minutes, blocking the doors of the houses from the outside. The adults in the family formed a chain to carry the children out through the window to a neighbor’s slightly higher window. Those with steel security grills on the first floor couldn’t get out. Nor could the elderly, of whom there are many in this town on the southern outskirts of Valencia.

The toll in the town and the surrounding area is dreadful. It is still provisional – as of Thursday afternoon, bodies were still being pulled from basements and garages and dozens of missing persons were still being counted by the authorities. Some of them may have been swept out to sea.

But it’s a miracle, really, that the count was not even greater. The violence of the flooding caused by exceptional rainfall upstream, the power of the waters pouring down from the hills, and the height of the wave, which reached 2 meters across the entire city, could have swept away even more people.

Residents recalled the acts of courage and all those lives that hung by a thread, a rope, an outstretched hand or 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. As their car began to wash away, Vicente ran, swam, clinging on as best he could. He reached the vehicle, broke a window and pulled his wife and their daughter out. They were able to take refuge in a building.

An impassable barrier of tangled cars

Along with others, he came to the aid of three elderly people who were about to be swept away. “Dozens of people have saved lives all around here,” Carrion explained. There was nothing he could do, however, for the 16-year-old girl whose body appeared amid the debris as the water began to recede. She either drowned or, more likely, was suffocated by the mud, which covered the town and filled her mouth.

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