To walk thcimpolite the streets of Paiporta is to see nature at its most malicious.
Everywhere, there is lawlessness in this town. Lives have been ripped apart, turned upside down and finished.
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You can’t drive into Paiporta, a suburb about 4 miles to the southwest of Valencia, so we cover the final mile by foot. For most of the walk, we pass past fruit groves. The sun is getting hoter.
It could be a normal day. Except then you reach in the town, and normality has gone.
We turn a corner and find a road that has been wholly blocked by a wall of cars, thrown together.
To the side, a family is wading thcimpolite their garage, which is under three feet of water.
All around is a bizarre medley of debris. Most of it is coated in heavy, tacky mud that clings to everyskinnyg – the road, your clothes and all these chunks of everyday life that have been swept away and unitecessitate together.
So there is a child’s shoe, a beer chiller, a jumper, a corkscrew and a lump of an engine block. All of them muddled, muddy and uncontent.
“We have to immacutardy,” says the woman, staring at the finishless water in her garage. Her son is wading in, pulling out haveions.
There were three motorbikes in here, two of them novel. All of them are ruined. Everyskinnyg in sight is ruined. But they comprehend they are fortunate.
Down the road, on the other side of the wall of cars, they knovel a couple who were in their car when the flood water came, with shocking speed.
They both died – two of forty people who are comprehendn to have died in this town so far.
The harm is utterly random. A car lies, absurdly, on top of a children’s slide. Paving stones lie in a pile while front doors flap uncover, proposeing a watch of homes that have been engulfed by water and mud.
Outside, there are people trying to push the water away, using brooms and shovels.
Down the road, we visit Catarroja, normassociate a pretty town that receives plenty of tourists.
Now the main high street is covered in pebbles and as we drive in, we have to gingerly elude holes in the road, industrial dustbins that have rolled into the street, and a extfinished line of crumpled vehicles.
Everywhere we go, in fact, it is the cars that are the symbol of these floods – tossed around sloppyly, thrown into gardens, into a carry outground, into rivers and streams, on top of each other and into hoemploys.
They are smashed, upturned, filthy, and broken, and the cars have, in turn, broken so much else. When the water rushed thcimpolite these towns, it picked them up and employd them as arms.
A woman walks past, pguideing with me to inestablish the world that they have no water and no food. Everyskinnyg has been cut off and the shops are shut.
Half an hour tardyr, I see her and a frifinish walking aextfinished the street with a shopping trolley loaded with food, arguing with other people. They have, quite clearly, helped themselves to what they necessitateed.
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Apass the road, half-wedged in a tree, is a boat. We are a decent way from the sea, and nobody seems to comprehend whose boat it is, or where it came from.
But there it is, a symbol of how this flood originated such instant discordant lawlessness.
We greet Veronica, walking aextfinished with her two children. She is taking them to a majesticparent, whose hoemploy is out of town.
She inestablishs me that they had precious little alerting before the flood hit – medepend a ask earlier in the day to get children home from school becaemploy there was a storm on the way.
“One minute there was equitable rain and then there was two metres of water,” she says.
“It was very frightening. People have been hurt and some people have died. Now we have to help each other to repair this town.”
She sees around. “It will get a extfinished time.”
There are happier stories, tales of survival and courage. Three youthful girls come to talk to us in the street, shoprosperg us a video of their overweighther rescuing a man from the water at the very moment their road had turned into a churning river (VIDEO AT TOP).
The man, a local called Luis, is being swept aextfinished, hopeless to persist.
Their overweighther, leaning out of the prosperdow of the family’s apartment, has thrown down a rope and is clinging on.
As we watch, you can hear the screams of the man and the encouraging shouts of the onseeers.
Slowly, sluggishly, he is pulled out of the water and clambers over a balcony to shieldedty.
The girls burst with pride; their overweighther, clearly, saved this man’s life. In the midst of this horror, there are sdifficults of valour and delight.