Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was evacuated from Spain’s flood disaster zone on Sunday as furious locals pelted mud at political leaders and the Spanish king over a string of failures that left them helplessly exposed to a deadly deluge.
The anger erupted after Sánchez, King Felipe and the head of the Valencia region arrived in Paiporta, a shell-shocked riverside town that is home to nearly one-third of the flood’s 214 victims, with some residents yelling “murderers” at the group.
People on the town’s slurry-filled streets complain that the authorities warned them too late about the flood threat this week, then compounded the error by mismanaging a slow and under-resourced relief effort that left many fending for themselves for days.
The explosive official visit came as the search for bodies in Paiporta was continuing five days after the flooding hit on Tuesday and triggered Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in decades. Rescuers were still pumping water out of underground car parks feared to have become tombs for people moving their vehicles.
The Socialist prime minister’s office said he was evacuated after the visitors were “insulted and attacked”. Carlos Mázon, head of the Valencia regional government, which is in charge of disaster prevention and relief, also left.
King Felipe stayed for more than an hour despite the hail of mud balls, as bodyguards tried to protect him with umbrellas and Queen Letizia broke down in tears.
Earlier in the town’s Bar Arosa, whose once bright yellow-and-white interior resembled a trash dump, owner Silvia Martínez was still overseeing the first stage of the clean-up process. “We’re sweeping sludge and sludge and sludge out on to the street,” she said.
The central government on Saturday vowed to boost the number of soldiers in the aid effort to 7,500 and Valencia’s regional administration promised more co-operation with Madrid. But Martínez was sceptical.
“The politicians on the TV say that food and water have been arriving here since the first day. That’s a lie,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the volunteers who are bringing us food from outside, we would have nothing.”
Residents collected milk, flour, chick peas and tomato sauce from a streetside table set up by donors, scenes once unthinkable in a middle-income town of 27,000 people near the Mediterranean Sea. Some people are still living without power, water and gas supplies at home.
Pressure on Mázon, a member of the conservative People’s party, is piling up like the stacks of crumpled cars that still block some streets. “We made mistakes, me included,” he said on Saturday. “We will get it right.” He announced the establishment of five crisis management committees with both national and regional officials.
Some opponents have criticised him for not declaring a “catastrophic emergency”, the highest alert level which would automatically transfer control to the Spanish government.
But Sánchez, a Socialist who has spent years in conflict with the People’s party, said the solution was not for the central government to take over. “We must forget our differences, put ideologies and territorial sensitivities aside, and act as one united country,” he said.
But he added: “There will be time to analyse negligence. To reflect on how to improve the distribution of powers in the face of such extreme situations.”
Aemet, Spain’s state weather agency, sent out the first “red alert” about intense rains at 7.36am on Tuesday, but it contained no advice about what people should do and was not broadcast widely.
In Paiporta, Mati Garces’s smartphone did not light up with an emergency alert until the regional authorities sent one after 8pm.
But two hours earlier Garces had confronted a surge of muddy water on the street where she and her children had been going to buy Halloween decorations. She rushed the family home to their upstairs apartment then watched as water rose to the top of her building’s front door. Then she helped rescue a man stranded on the roof of a van by throwing a sheet to him and hauling him up through a first floor window.
“So the warning arrived, the siren went off on my phone, when the guy we rescued was already inside my house,” she said.
For many in Paiporta, the shock of the town’s river bursting its banks was exacerbated by the fact that the torrential downpours had happened elsewhere. “The Aemet alert was about rain. But here it didn’t rain,” Garces said.
Around the corner, Gabriela Navarre was furious that the local authorities had closed parks and cemeteries on Tuesday afternoon, but not schools. “So I can’t take my kids to the park, but they can die at school?”
The military’s emergency response unit had come to Paiporta, bringing several vehicles and doing “whatever people need”, said one soldier, including removing cars and rubble that had blocked people inside their own homes.
But residents said they needed more water pumps, mud extractors and cranes. And army personnel were far outnumbered by the thousands of volunteers who had walked miles to help clean up affected towns, carrying brooms, spades, pick axes and wheelbarrows.
The authorities have expressed their gratitude, but tried to cap the size of the volunteer army — and urged people to wear rubber boots so they do not end up in difficulty themselves.
A reckoning with the financial costs is only just beginning. Carmen Marin, 27, who was cleaning out a basement garage, said her family and its transport business had lost six cars. “We don’t know if we’re going to get back 80 per cent of what we’ve lost or 50 per cent or nothing,” she said.
But insurance and compensation are subjects for another day. For now the pain of the most tragic losses is still too much. “I think there are going to be more dead, a lot more,” said Juan Enrique Marin, her father. “Because we were not prepared. We were not warned.”
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