PAIPORTA, Spain (AP) — The mangled car in which Jorge Tarazona’s three-year-old niece and sister-in-law perished in last week’s catastrophic flooding in Spain now hangs halfway off the ragged edge of highway.
His brother managed to survive, clinging to a fence. He and his family had been caught in traffic driving home to Paiporta on Valencia’s southern outskirts, Tarazona said. They had no chance to escape when the tsunami-like wave quickly overflowed the nearby drainage canal and swept away everything in its path.
“They did not have time to do anything,” Tarazona told The Associated Press, a week after the Oct. 29 flash floods. “My brother was dragged away and ended up clinging to a fence.” His sister-in-law “could not get out and died with her little girl.”
Tarazona had ridden a bike back to the site and taped a note on the car asking for whoever eventually removed the wreck off the side of the highway, to call him.
“It all happened so fast,” he said, tears coming to his eyes. “In half an hour the current had carried away the car. There was no time, no time. She managed to send me the location of their car hoping for a rescue.
“The next day she was found dead inside,” he said.
It’s unclear if the two are included in the official toll of the 217 confirmed dead as fatalities tick up, eight days after the deadliest floods in Spain this century.
Paiporta has been labeled by Spanish media as the “ground zero” of the natural disaster that has also left 89 people still missing, while officials say the real figure could be higher.
Over 60 people perished in Paiporta when a wave of water rushed down the Poyo canal that cuts through its center. Frustration over the survivors’ sense of abandonment exploded in Paiporta on Sunday when a crowd greeted Spain’s royals and officials with a barrage of mud and other objects.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was rushed away and the royal couple had to eventually cancel the visit after speaking to several distraught neighbors amid a chaotic scene.
The Civil Guard said they rescued two people who had been trapped in their Paiporta home, almost a miraculous exception among the tragedy.
The mayor of Paiporta, a middle-class community of 30,000, on Tuesday pleaded for a “higher authority” to step in and take control of her municipality because the floods had made it impossible to go on. Mayor Maribel Albalat said all the municipal buildings, from the townhall to the local police, had been severely damaged and that many of the local civil servants “are in a state of shock.”