The mangled car in which Jorge Tarazona’s three-year-old niece and sister-in-law were killed in last week’s catastrophic flooding in Spain now hangs halfway from the bumpy side of the road.
His brother managed to survive by holding on to the fence.
He and his family were caught in traffic while driving home to Paiport on the southern outskirts of Valencia, Tarazona said.
They had no chance of escape when a tsunami-like wave quickly swept over a nearby drainage channel and swept away everything in its path.
“They didn’t have time to do anything,” Tarazona told the AP, a week after the Oct. 29 flash floods.
– My brother was dragged away and in the end he grabbed onto the fence.
His sister-in-law “couldn’t get out and died with her little girl.”
Tarazona rode his bike back to the spot and taped a note on the car asking for a call from whoever might remove the wreckage from the side of the highway.
“Everything happened so fast,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
“In half an hour, the electricity took the car away. There was no time, there was 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 is unclear whether the two are included in the official death toll of 217 confirmed as the death toll rises, eight days after Spain’s deadliest floods this century.
Paiporta has been designated by Spanish media as ground zero of the natural disaster that also left 89 people missing, while officials say the real figure could be higher.
More than 60 people died in Paiporta when a wave of water rushed down the Poyo canal that cuts through its center.
Frustration over survivors’ feelings of abandonment exploded in Paiporta on Sunday when crowds greeted the Spanish royal family and officials with a barrage of mud and other objects.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez left urgently, and the royal couple eventually had to cancel their visit after speaking to several distraught neighbors amid the chaotic scene.
The destruction, however, went far beyond Paiporta and covers a large strip of municipalities, primarily in the southern part of the city of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast.
At least one person died from the floods in seventy-eight places.
The police expanded the search to nearby swamps and the coast, where some were washed away by the waters.
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Residents, businesses and city councils in affected areas can apply for financial assistance from a 10.6 billion euro ($16 billion) aid package from the Spanish government.
Local volunteers were the first responders on the ground, shoveling and shoveling the sticky brown mud that covered everything and helping to begin removing pile after pile of debris that blocked access to cars in many areas.
Authorities eventually mobilized 15,000 soldiers and police reinforcements to help firefighters search for bodies and begin to retrieve thousands of wrecked cars strewn across streets and submerged in canal beds.