Miguel Aleixandre, a supermarket worker and competitive power-lifter who lives in the small Valencian town of Utiel, was mid-workout on Tuesday morning at his gym when the staff suddenly announced they were closing up because of the torrential rains that had been pummelling the streets since dawn.
The sheer volume of those rains, which have so far claimed at least 205 lives across eastern, central and southern Spain, was becoming more and more apparent as the waters of the Magro – a river that is normally little more than a stream through Utiel – began to rise and rise.
Almost an hour earlier, Spain’s state meteorological office, Aemet, had updated its severe weather warning, raising the alert level across the province of Valencia to red. “Be very careful!” it warned. “The danger is extreme. Stay away from rivers and watercourses as flooding is happening.”
By the time Aleixandre, 22, hitched a lift home to the house he shares with his mother and father close to the banks of the Magro, the water on the streets was about 30cm (12in) deep. Over the next few hours, it would reach ten times that height and kill six people in the town.
“I only just managed to get into the house because of the water,” he says. “We went up to the top of the house and stayed there.”
A few minutes’ walk away, Inmaculada Haba had also been starting to worry as the water seeped into the ground floor of her house.
“We were watching how the river was rising – normally there’s hardly any water in it – and in a matter of seconds, the water started flooding in,” she says. “The wall they built next to it a few years ago did nothing and there was also water coming in from up the hill. In a matter of seconds, I grabbed my two dogs and rushed them up to the first floor.”
When Haba came down that afternoon to get the dogs some food, the water was up to her knees. She and her family retreated upstairs – a decision that almost certainly saved their lives.
As she and her relatives sweep the last of the water from their home and bin their sodden belongings – “I’m OK because we’re all safe and sound and material things can be replaced” – she points to the watermark the floods have left, 1.7 metres (5ft 6in) up her walls. “I’m not very tall and you can see how high the water was. It would have been over my head if I’d tried to come down,” she says.
Fran Platero, 38, who runs a heavy machinery business, was trapped in his home with his wife and two terrified young children for five hours until salvation appeared around 8pm in the form of a neighbour and his tractor.
“We climbed into the scoop and he took us to safety up at the hotel, which is the highest part of town,” says Platero. “There was an alert, but we never thought it would rain like it did here. Never. We’ve had floods before but nothing like this.”
Platero repaid the favour by working through Tuesday night, using one of his own diggers to help rescue people from their homes. But not everyone could be reached in time. “A lot of people have died here,” he says. “They were old people who lived on the ground floor and who couldn’t save themselves.”
Aleixandre will never forget the sights and sounds of that night. As he used a torch to tap out an SOS to the firefighters’ helicopter that was buzzing over the town, he felt he had stepped into a horror film.
“You could hear the neighbours’ windows breaking because of the water pressure and then all the water getting in,” he says. “And then I saw old people appearing at their windows with candles to try to attract the attention of the rescuers.”
Aleixandre and his family were rescued at 7am on Wednesday when a small boat from the military emergencies unit (UME) of the Spanish armed forces pulled up outside their house. It would be almost 12 hours before the family was allowed home; police spent Wednesday afternoon pulling the bodies of some of their neighbours from the mud.
Like others in the town, the family are puzzled and angry as to why the Valencian regional government did not send out a civil protection alert to people’s mobile phones until 8.12pm on Tuesday.
“By then, the water was 3 metres high,” says Aleixandre. “I keep calling it a horror film because I don’t know how else to describe it. When you see something like this on TV – or a tsunami or something – you feel sad and you feel empathy. But when you live that story yourself, it’s just unbelievable. A friend’s car was parked here and it turned up at a bus stop 500 metres away, split in half and with a rubbish container on top of it.”
The ferocity of the rains – forecast last week – that brought Spain’s deadliest floods in decades is plain to see in Utiel even in its half swept-up aftermath. UME personnel, firefighters and police and civil protection officers wade through a sticky carpet of mud that is still inches deep on streets veined with hose-pumps and clotted with loud generators. The mud itself has become a repository for the contents of people’s homes, clutching a child’s toy, a yoghurt pot, a bottle of olive oil, a sparkplug and a table leg in its stubborn, orange-brown grasp. Utiel’s streets are piled with soggy, ruined sofas, rugs, lampshades, mattresses and wardrobes, and washed-away walls offer glimpses of patios and dining rooms.
Three upside-down cars lie in a patch of wasteland near the river. The bodywork of a Volkswagen Tiguan is peeling off like flayed skin. Close by, a BMW seems to have survived until you look through an open back window and see the pools of mud inside. The local Guardia Civil barracks was also hit and has bequeathed a stack of damp, official-looking chairs to a nearby skip.
Amid the damage, destruction and mourning, however, there is also a potent sense of solidarity. Almost everyone in Utiel between the ages of five and 90 seems to be wielding a broom, and tractors, diggers, mini-diggers and farm vehicles beetle through the still-flooded streets offering help to anyone in need.
“The solidarity people here in Utiel have shown has been amazing – and people have been risking their lives saving others,” says Ricardo Gabaldón, who has been the town’s mayor for the past 18 months. He sits, sleep-starved and anxious, in his town hall office, still palpably relieved that he gave the order to close Utiel’s schools first thing on Tuesday.
“Six people died here, almost all of them were old and had reduced mobility,” he says. “But there could have been hundreds of deaths here. Hundreds. People come here for school from nearby villages and they would have been hit when they were in their cars or the kids would have been in school when the waters came.”
Gabaldón’s priorities are re-establishing power to parts of the town, making sure there is enough water for everyone, and helping the hundreds of people who have lost their homes, cars and livelihoods.
Recovery, both economic and emotional, will take a long time. Aleixandre’s sister, Carmen, is still trying to process events as she sweeps the water out of her parents’ house.
“I can’t tell you what happened here,” she says. “I just don’t have the words to describe it.” Her brother, meanwhile, keeps returning to something his rescuers told him early on Wednesday.
“This was all new for us, but the UME deal with disasters. But when they were getting us out of here by boat, they told us they’d never seen anything like this in Spain. Ever.”
