The rescue unit soldier shakes his head. “You can’t be prepared for something like this. » The man has just spent long minutes lying between three cars stacked, embedded, crushed along with a dozen others against a small concrete bridge over a water evacuation canal on the outskirts of Chiva, one of the cities most affected by the floods in the Valencian Community. Their job is dangerous and exhausting because they have to check the interior of each vehicle, some of which are submerged, sometimes half buried in the rubble. A crane tried to pull the cars from above, but was unsuccessful. A huge excavator took charge of removing them. At night, soldiers dig through the mud of the canal with sticks.
The operation takes place two kilometers upstream from Chiva, 280 meters above sea level, one of the municipalities where the rains were most impressive, on Tuesday, October 29: more than 40 cm in a few hours, the equivalent of a year whole of precipitation. The earth could not digest such volumes and the water rolled down the hill towards the city of 16,000 inhabitants and then towards Valencia and the sea, causing the death of more than 200 people, according to a still provisional balance sheet. The damage resembles that of an avalanche, since the flood dragged debris of all kinds, tearing away the cobblestones of the towns, the tar from the roads, the concrete blocks from the walls, the stones from the fields, the earth, the trunks. and everything else that human intelligence and consumer society have produced, from washing machines to automobiles, including furniture.
In Chiva, as in hundreds of similar places, searches are carried out under extremely difficult conditions to try to find missing people for whom no official figures have been reported. The industrial zone of the city took the lead despite the fact that the warehouses were located several hundred meters from the Barranco del Gallo, this stream of water that became, for a few hours, a formidable machine of destruction, and therefore of destruction. .
“Mountains of cars”
The stream overflowed, devastating several hectares of land. The railway has gone awry, literally. The vehicles were scattered across the surrounding fields, among the olive trees, leaving the impression of a landscape at the end of the world. “The cars are still piled up by hundreds and hundreds in the mud. There are mountains and mountains of cars. Many will be empty, but others are likely to be clearly full.explained, through tears, the mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, on public radio on Friday morning.
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