Flood in Spain: completely random damage in the city where 40 people died, the car ended up on a children’s slide

To walk the streets of Paiporta is to see nature at its most depraved.

There is chaos everywhere in this city. Lives were torn apart, turned upside down and ended.

Latest floods in Spain: Looting breaks out as flood death toll tops 150

Paiporto, a suburb located about 4 miles southwest of Valencia, is not accessible, so we walk the last mile. Most of the way we pass by fruit groves. The sun is getting warmer.

It could have been an ordinary day. But then you come to the city and normality disappears.

We turn a corner and find the road completely blocked by a wall of cars piled together.

To the side, a family makes their way through their garage, which is three feet underground.

There is a weird mess of garbage all around. Much of it is covered in thick, sticky mud that sticks to everything – the road, your clothes, and all those bits of everyday life that have been swept away and mixed together.

So there’s a baby shoe, a beer cooler, a jumper, a corkscrew and a piece of the engine block. They are all confused, cloudy and sad.

“We need to clean up,” the woman says, looking at the endless water in her garage. Her son enters the room and takes out things.

There were three motorcycles, two of them new. They are all destroyed. Everything that is visible is destroyed. But they know they are lucky.

Further down the road, on the other side of the wall of cars, they knew a couple who were driving in their car when the floodwaters came in with amazing speed.

They both died – two of the forty people known to have died in this city so far.

The damage is completely random. The car lies awkwardly on a children’s slide. Paving stones lie in a pile and front doors swing open to reveal houses drenched in water and mud.

Outside, people are trying to push away the water with brooms and shovels.

On the way we visit Catarroja, usually a beautiful city that receives many tourists.

Now the main street is covered with pebbles, and as we enter we have to carefully avoid potholes in the road, industrial trash cans that have rolled out onto the street and a long line of crumpled cars.

Wherever we go, the symbol of these floods is actually cars – carelessly abandoned, thrown into gardens, playgrounds, rivers and streams, on top of each other and into houses.

They are broken, overturned, dirty and broken, and the cars, in turn, have broken many other things. As the water rushed through these cities, it picked them up and used them as weapons.

A woman walks by, begging me to tell the world that they have no water or food. Everything is shut down, shops are closed.

Half an hour later, I see her and her friend walking down the street with a shopping cart loaded with food and arguing with other people. It’s clear that they got what they needed.

Across the road, half wedged into a tree, is a boat. We are a fair distance from the sea and no one seems to know whose boat it is or where it came from.

But here it is, a symbol of how this flood created such instant dissonant chaos.

We meet Veronica walking with two children. She takes them to their grandparents, whose house is outside the city.

She tells me that they had very little warning before the flood – just a request earlier in the day to take the kids home from school because there was a storm on the way.

“One minute it was raining, and then there was two meters of water,” she says.

“It was very scary. People were injured, some died. Now we must help each other rebuild this city.”

She looks around. “It will take a long time.”

There are happier stories, tales of survival and courage. Three young girls came to talk to us on the street and showed us a video of their father rescuing a man from the water just as their road turned into a raging river (VIDEO ABOVE).

The man, a local resident named Luis, is carried away as he desperately tries to survive.

Their father, leaning out of the window of the family apartment, has thrown off the rope and is clinging to it.

As we watch, you can hear the man screaming and the spectators shouting encouragement.

Slowly, slowly, they pull him out of the water and climb over the balcony to safety.

The girls burst with pride; their father apparently saved the man’s life. Amidst this horror, there are shards of valor and joy.