Spain floods: 'Abandoned' town of Paiporta finally getting back on its feet

There is something haunting about the town of Paiporta, a place that still lives with the scars of disaster and the trauma of awful suffering.

Dozens of people died here and yet we are a short drive from the third biggest city in Spain. If wealth and history were a shield, Paiporta should have been safe. Instead, it was smashed.

We meet Juan, whose mother and father shared a comfortable apartment in the town. On the day when the rain started to fall, his father, Enrique, went down to the car park to move his car.

His wife followed him, lagging just behind. That short gap between husband and wife was to change their lives.

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Enrique got to his car, and found that the water had already started to gather in the car park. When Juan's mother reached the door of the car park, she couldn't push it open because of the pressure of the water on the other side.

She phoned her husband to explain and Enrique told her that a number of neighbours were gathered together in the car park, and that she shouldn't worry about him.

But instead, he was to end up trapped inside as the water gushed in. Enrique died in the car park.

"He was the leader and I was so proud of him," Juan tells me as we meet in Valencia. "I could see the disaster. When I arrived with my brother, I could see the water inside the car park going up to 1.70m high. I went up to my father's house and my mother was still waiting for my father.

"I went back down to where I could see the water - there was a lot of mud. I shouted out 'Enrique, Papa' but nothing. And I think no…I want to think it happened quickly. I could see then that it was impossible for me to do anything."

Juan phoned the police to plead for help, for specialist machinery to get into the car park. He says the person on the other end laughed at him, told him the service was overwhelmed and said "do you think I can do magic?", before hanging up.

Instead, he spent four hours filing a police report, and then waited days for his father's body to be recovered.

"I want to say nobody helps us. Only the volunteers. Again and again, they are helping. But the professionals, the politicians - after, during, later…no. Are they human?"

Juan is now trying to collate testimonies from others who have lost family members and will push for a full inquiry into why the response to this disaster seemed to be so sluggish.

"All we want is the truth," he says. "We are going to do everything to get the truth. We want justice. We want only that. The people who are guilty… if these kind of people stay in the same place they are not going to learn anything."

Juan's pain is the searing agony of the bereaved, and you see it echoed through Paiporta. When so many people have died in such a tight-knit community, almost everyone knows someone who has suffered loss.

But, more than two weeks after these floods, there is another gnawing emotion - lingering, chronic disappointment and anger at those who were supposed to manage a crisis like this. At politicians, police and the military, who seemed to stand back and leave people to fend for themselves.

When I first came to Paiporta, I met Cristina Hernandez in the street. She, like so many other people, was trying to deal with a frightened family, a damaged house and a fear of chaos and looting. She said the town felt abandoned.

Now, things have changed. Not only is her house habitable, but there are military vehicles around the town, part of a concerted effort to get Paiporta back on its feet.

"I feel that we have had the response very late," she tells me. "We should have been helped before because when the army came, and they were organised, we could see how fast they can work and how fast they could help. But we were abandoned for four, five days. It was too late for many people and for all the neighbours here.

"I try to be optimistic, but it will take months, maybe years, to get Paiporta back to how it was. Everybody knows a family that has suffered, that has lost someone. It's a small town and everybody knows each other, so we are grieving for them, even though it's not our family."

Time heals, of course. But it will take a long time in Paiporta. There is a lot of healing to be done.

(c) Sky News 2024: Spain floods: 'Abandoned' town of Paiporta finally getting back on its feet