Volunteers clear muddy rubble after deadly flooding in Spain as authorities struggle to respond

CHIVA, Spain. (AP) — Mud cakes her boots and splatters her leggings and the gloves in which she holds a broom. Brown specks of freckles on her cheeks.

The rags covering Alicia Montero are the hallmark of a makeshift army of volunteers who spent a third day on Friday raking and sweeping away the dirt and debris that filled the small town of Chiva in Valencia after flash floods swept through the region. Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory has left at least 205 people dead, countless more missing and countless lives in tatters.

READ MORE: At least 158 ​​people have died in Spain’s catastrophic floods as authorities continue to search for bodies.

As police and emergency services continue a grim search for bodies, authorities appear stunned by the scale of the disaster and survivors are relying on the spirit of volunteers who rushed to fill the void.

While hundreds of people in cars and on foot flocked from Valencia to the suburbs to help, Montero and her friends are local residents of Chiva, where at least seven people died when a fierce storm hit on Tuesday.

“I never thought this could happen. Seeing my city like this touches me,” Montero told The Associated Press. “We’ve always had fall thunderstorms, but nothing like this.”

She says she narrowly avoided the flooding as she drove home Tuesday, and that if she had entered the road five minutes later, she believes she would have been swept away like the dozens of cars still stranded on the highway that crosses the floodplain between her. town and city of Valencia, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the east.

Tractors roar through the narrow streets of Chiva, stopping only briefly or slowing down to allow people to throw broken doors, smashed furniture and other debris into garden beds before moving upward, away from the epicenter of the destruction.

Meanwhile, residents and volunteers rake and sweep away layers of dirt covering the floors of destroyed shops and homes, the air buzzing with frantic energy. People carry buckets of water from a large decorative pool in the town square to wash away dirt. Three boys take a break to kick a soccer ball on a slippery street.

Newbies are easy to spot because they are clean, but take a few steps on Chiva’s slippery cobblestones and they quickly become covered in mud.

“How many hours did we spend on this? Who knows?” Montero says, taking a break from cleaning near a gorge that just days ago was filled with a crushing wall of water.

“We work, stop to eat the sandwich they give us, and continue working.”

Death by dirt

“There is so much dirt in the streets, as if the water had just disappeared from the face of the earth,” is how Charles Dickens described 19th-century London in his novel Bleak House.

In Chiva and other parts of Valencia – Paiport, Masanas, Barrio de la Torre, Alfafar – dirt has become synonymous with death and destruction. The rags flowed into houses and into cars, breaking some cars into pieces and easily lifting and moving others.

This week’s storm dumped more rain on Chiva in eight hours than in the previous 20 months. The flooding caused flooding that destroyed two of the city’s four bridges and made crossing a third unsafe. The waters have now receded and Civil Guard divers have left, but police continue to search the gorge, smashing houses and underground garages, fearing that more bodies may be hiding in the mud.

“Entire houses have disappeared. We don’t know whether there were people inside or not,” Mayor Amparo Fort told RNE radio.

Citizens fill the void left by authorities

So many people are flocking to help in the hardest-hit areas that authorities have asked people not to travel or walk there as they block roads needed by emergency services.

“It is very important that you return home,” said regional President Carlos Mason, thanking the volunteers for their goodwill. The regional government asked volunteers to gather on Saturday morning at the city’s major cultural center to organize work crews and transport.

Electricity was finally restored to Chiva’s 20,000 residents on Thursday evening, but there is still no running water. Local authorities are distributing water, food and essential supplies to towns in Valencia affected by the floods, and the Red Cross is using its extensive aid network to help those affected.

In Chiva, Civil Guard police are searching destroyed houses and a ravine for bodies and traffic itself. Firefighters help keep buildings safe. Around 500 soldiers have been deployed to the Valencia region to deliver water and essential goods to those in need, with more on the way.

But there are no military units yet in Chiva, where a wave of solidarity among ordinary citizens highlights the lack of official assistance. The atmosphere is as if the townspeople are just getting on with it.

A man cries in the Astoria movie theater, which has been converted into a supply depot. The theater is filled with piles of water bottles and fruit. People make sandwiches. One group of young men arrives and hands out bottled water before taking shovels and brooms and joining the fight.

Opposite the square at the town hall there is a sign stating that everyone is allowed to take two bottles of water with them per day. Volunteers hand out sandwiches and baguettes.

As she cleans out a bakery that has been in her family for five generations, Maria Teresa Sanchez hopes it will continue, but she’s not sure if her 100-year-old oven can be saved.

“It will take Chiva 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 really what we accept, this spirit of an isolated city where no one came to help, but see how we all ended up on the street? This is the shining light of this whole story.”

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