Crashing waves in a hilltop village: Inside a night of terror from Spain’s floods

Irene Cuevas will never forget the sound of the waves crashing below her apartment’s balcony.

If only there had been a flash of lightning in the darkness to let her glimpse what sounded like a roaring sea.

“It was a constant fear because we didn’t have light to see by," Cuevas said. "We could hear the roar of the waves, which was unbelievable. The street was completely flooded and we were hoping for some lightning so that we could at least see what situation we were in. It was all waves, currents everywhere.

“We have that sound of the waves burned in our memory.”

The devastating flash floods in eastern Spain this week that claimed over 200 lives and destroyed countless homes and livelihoods also seared a scar of terror in many survivors

Cuevas, a 48-year-old embryologist, is a resident of Chiva, a village perched on a hill about 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Valencia city, whose southern outskirts were likewise ravaged by the floods on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Chiva got more rain in eight hours than the town had experienced in the preceding 20 months. Cuevas was at home and saw how the gorge dividing her village suddenly overflowed with rushing water.

The tsunami-like wall of water claimed at least seven lives in Chiva, home to some 16,000 people, and the search goes on for more missing, either in collapsed houses or in the gorge.

“It was terrifying because that night it began to rain and the water began to overflow the gorge and started carrying away cars and trees,” Cuevas said. “The underpasses of the bridges started to clog with debris, and the water started to flow through the entire village.”

The gorge, called the “Barranco de Chiva,” is normally dry, but it is fed into by several other runoff gorges and channels water to vineyards below.

The huge storm sent a blast of water that knocked down two of the four bridges crossing the gorge, while a third was left unsafe to cross. The sides of the gorge were eaten out, bringing down a sidewalk and several houses and tearing holes in others.

Cuevas, who moved to Chiva when she got married 18 years ago, lives one street over from the buildings bordering the gorge. She and other people living in her apartment building helped several neighbors from the building in front when they feared it would come down. The neighbors said their building trembled from the force of the water.

Cuevas and her fellow residents helped tie ropes or cords across the street so that the people on the other side could hang on as they waded through the rushing water. They then made it up the stairs and some 20 people spent a sleepless night in her second-floor apartment and the apartment above.

Amparo Cerda, Cuevas' upstairs neighbor, described herself as traumatized by her memories of the fury of the waves and the sound of “doors exploding” from the water’s force.

It was as if their building had become a ship lost in a storm at sea in the pitch black night.

“There were waves in the gorge, waves in the street below where the water came in the other direction and ran into the water coming from the gorge," Cuevas said. "So right here, at this corner, just where the houses fell down, the two currents hit and produced terrifying waves.”

“When the daylight came we could see the damage,” Cuevas said. “We saw all the houses that had disappeared and there was a feeling of impotence because you didn’t know where to start looking for people.”

Five days have passed since that night of terror, and in Chiva and other localities, such as Paiporta, Barrio de la Torre, and Massanassa, citizens and volunteers are pitching in to clean up the mountains of debris and the thick brown layers of mud left by the water.

Five thousand more soldiers are arriving in the area this weekend to help the 2,500 already deployed. Thousands of police officers have also been sent in.

But for now it is the people themselves still leading the way.

“Now we need to clean up and try to get back to normal because there are more rains forecast for the weekend, and that won’t help," Cuevas said. "We are trying to get everything ready for when the rains comes back. Because they will.”