Spain: Flood victims empty supermarkets in Valencia after horror flood

Valencia (Spanish) – Flood victims grab whatever is still on the shelves in a supermarket and drag it home without paying, there are no cashiers: Sprite, chocolate, ham, beer. Meat from the fresh counter.

José Maria (67) is also here. “Our family lost four cars. We have to eat. “We are not robbers,” he said, apologizing for the theft to the BILD reporters. Scenes like from a disaster movie.

Victims are looking for help

The supermarket is located in Paiporta, a suburb of Valencia (Spain), which is special badly hit by the floods became. Before the horror rain, a mostly dry ravine ran through the suburb. On Tuesday it became a raging flash flood.

Flood victims are in the streets looking for help. “We have no water, no electricity, the phones are off, there are looters everywhere. Where is the military?” shouts Sandra Lopez (47), trudging through the muddy streets with her sister Lara and daughter Lisa (13).

Helisa (50) and her son Nacho (12) are looking for water for the toilet. She is crying. “Many residents are still missing,” she says.

While people stock up on the essentials, black sheep take advantage of the chaos and steal cell phones, perfume and jewelry.

Looters threaten neighbors with sticks

Looters carried sticks, threatened neighbors and security forces, and emptied stores, a jewelry store and a pharmacy. The police finally intervened and arrested 39 suspects so far.

ATMs would also be destroyed. Even off-road vehicles are the target of the robber gangs – in order to be able to move better through mud and flooded areas.

The Spanish newspaper “El País” said it had access to Guardia Civil group chats in which it said about the looting: “There were people with carts (this means shopping carts) with ten hams while we cover bodies here.” Police have introduced security checks at shopping centers to stop the looting.

Shopkeeper throws thieves out

Users are sharing numerous videos of the looting on social media. In a video you can see how the daughter of a shop owner throws the thieves, some of whom she knows by sight, out of the flooded shop. She keeps asking, “Did you go to the checkout to pay?”

In another video, a man stands in a parking lot and a car alarm can be heard in the background. The man points to an Aldi supermarket and explains: Because the people in their destroyed houses cannot heat up food or boil water, they themselves tear open cans of tuna in the supermarket to eat them there.

On site in Paiporta, a queue has formed in front of a hose from which brown water is flowing. People put it in buckets and bottles. It flows from the full garage of a single-family home and the owner laboriously pumps it out.

Meanwhile, the search for missing people continues. In the cars that are piling up on the streets bodies still trapped. Many more deaths are suspected.

The German physiotherapist Markus (46) has lived in Valencia for 16 years and has his practice here. “I don’t know how many of my patients are still alive,” he said on Thursday. “The water was up to two meters high, many were bedridden and living on the ground floor.”