Volunteers with mud clear flood debris in a Spanish town as authorities scramble to respond

CHIVA, Spain. (AP) — Mud piles up her boots, spatters her leggings and the gloves that hold her broom. Brown spots freckle his cheeks.

The mud covering Alicia Montero is the signature uniform of the makeshift army of volunteers who, for the third day on Friday, shoveled and swept away the mud and debris that filled the small town of Chiva in Valencia after flash floods swept the region. Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory it left at least 205 people dead with untold numbers still missing and countless lives in tatters.

Like police and emergency workers the grim search for bodies continuesthe authorities seem overwhelmed by the enormity of the disaster, and the survivors rely on the esprit de corps of volunteers who have rushed in to fill the void.

While hundreds of people in cars and on foot came from the city of Valencia to the suburbs to help, Montero and her friends are locals from Chiva, where at least seven people died when they died on Tuesday. the storm unleashed its fury.

“I never thought this could happen. It makes me emotional to see my city in this form,” Montero told The Associated Press. “We’ve always had fall storms, but nothing like this.”

She says that she barely avoided flooding as she was driving home on Tuesday, and that if she had gotten off the road five minutes later, she believes she would have been swept away like dozens of cars still stuck on the highway that crosses a flood plain between her town and the city of Valencia, about 30 kilometers away ( 18 miles) to the east.

Tractors rumble through Chiva’s narrow streets, stopping only briefly or slowing down to allow people to dump broken doors, broken furniture and other debris into beds before lifting off, away from the epicenter of the destruction.

Meanwhile, residents and volunteers shovel and sweep the layers of mud covering the floors of ruined shops and houses, the air buzzing with frantic energy. People carry buckets of water from a large ornamental pool in a town square to wash off the mud. Three boys take a break to kick a soccer ball on the slippery street.

Newcomers are easy to spot because they are clean, but a few steps down the slippery pavement of Chiva and they are quickly marked with mud.

“How many hours have I been at this? Who knows?” says Montero, as he takes a breather from cleaning up near a gorge that was filled with a crushing wall of water days earlier.

“We work, we stop to eat a sandwich they give us, and we continue to work.”

Death by mud

“As much mud in the streets as if the waters had receded from the face of the earth,” is Charles Dickens’ description of 19th-century London in his novel Bleak House.

In Chiva and other parts of Valencia – Paiporta, Masanasa, Barrio de la Torre, Alfafar – mud has become synonymous with death and destruction. The mud flowed into homes and dragged into cars, crushing some vehicles and easily lifting and moving others.

This week’s storm unleashed more rain on Chiva in eight hours than the city has experienced in the past 20 months. The deluge generated a flood that brought down two of the city’s four bridges and made a third unsafe to cross. The waters have now receded and the Civil Guard divers have disappeared, but police continue to search the gorge, destroyed houses and underground garages, worried that the mud could hide more bodies.

“Whole houses have disappeared. We don’t know if there were people inside or not,” mayor Amparo Fort told RNE radio.

Citizens fill the void left by the authorities

There are so many people coming to help the worst affected areas that authorities have asked them not to drive or walk there because they are blocking roads needed by emergency services.

“It is very important to return home,” said regional president Carlos Mazón, who thanked the volunteers for their kindness. The regional government asked volunteers to gather at a large cultural center in the city on Saturday morning to organize work crews and transport.

Electricity was finally restored to the 20,000 residents of Khiva on Thursday evening, and there is still no running water. Local authorities have distributed water, food and basic supplies in towns in Valencia affected by flash floods, and the Red Cross is using its vast aid network to help those affected.

The Civil Guard policemen were at Chiva searching collapsed houses and the gorge for bodiesand traffic routing. Firefighters help keep buildings safe. About 500 soldiers have been deployed to the Valencia region to deliver water and essential goods to those in need, and more are on the way.

But so far there are no military units in Khiva, where the wave of solidarity among average citizens underscores the lack of official help. The vibe is one of townspeople just getting on with it.

A man cries inside the Astoria Cinema, which has been converted into a supply depot. The theater is filled with piles of water bottles and fruit. People make sandwiches. A group of young men arrive and leave bottled water before picking up shovels and brooms and joining the fray.

Just across a square from the town hall, a sign says that everyone is allowed two bottles of water a day. Volunteers hand out baguette sandwiches.

Cleaning out the bakery that has been in her family for five generations, María Teresa Sánchez hopes it will survive, but she’s not sure if her 100-year-old oven can be saved.

“Chiva will take a long time to recover from this,” she said. “But it’s true that we didn’t feel alone. We help each other. And in the end, that’s what we embrace, that spirit of being a city that’s isolated and nobody’s come to help us, but you see how we’re all in the streets? That is the shining light of this story.”

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Medrano reported from Madrid. Associated Press writers Colleen Barry in Milan and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.

Joseph Wilson and Teresa Medrano, The Associated Press