In Spanish Town Devastated by Flood, a Grim Search for Bodies

Rescuers in Paiporta, where more than 60 people died, were still pulling bodies from the mud. “We are alive,” a resident said. “But we have lost everything.”

Plates with half-eaten dinners were still sitting on the white tablecloths in the nursing home’s dining hall on Thursday, amid muddy and overturned wheelchairs and walkers. Six people died in the facility on Tuesday, as a raging river exploded out of its banks and swept through villages and towns around the Spanish city of Valencia, on the country’s east-central coast.

Among them was the town of Paiporta, where residents said the water came without warning. It had not even been raining on Tuesday night when the water from the river swept in suddenly.

Staff members at the nursing home tried to move residents to safety on the second floor but did not manage to get everyone, and some of them drowned, said a town official.

The floods killed at least 158 people in Spain, in the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s recent history, with almost all of those deaths, 155, in the Province of Valencia. More than 60 of the victims were killed in Paiporta, a working-class town on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia, according to the official, Vicent Ciscar, the town’s deputy mayor.

The body of a teenage girl was pulled out of her parents’ cafe in Paiporta, according to several residents who saw it, and laid with her favorite white shoes in the town’s square in front of a pink church. A few yards away, the bodies of five workers were removed from the Consum supermarket, said Sgt. Daniel Álvarez of Spain’s Civil Protection and Emergencies agency.