THIS is the extraordinary moment an off-duty police officer saved the life of a Spanish flood survivor by holding onto her with a rope of bedsheets.
Daniel Garcia from Benetusser, near Valencia, kicked into action to save the lives of two people who lived in the apartments below him.
SOLARPIX.COMOff-duty police officer Daniel Garcia leaning out of a window clinging to a makeshift rope to rescue a flood survivor[/caption]
SOLARPIX.COMThe woman was hauled to safety more than three hours after the rescue began[/caption]
Garcia recalled the terrifying ordeal when speaking to a Spanish news outletSOLARPIX.COM
One of these was an elderly woman who was saved by Garcia and fellow neighbours after the hero police officer and his son made a rope out of bedsheets and curtains.
The pair rushed to grab any material they could tie together with their bare hands in a desperate attempt to save people from the devastating flash floods that struck the country on Tuesday night.
The destruction caused by the torrents of water has already claimed the lives of at least 202 people, the majority of these confirmed fatalities were in the province of Valencia alone.
‘A MIRACLE’
Despite Garcia’s scramble to save the life of the unnamed woman, it was not until almost four hours later that she could be hauled to safety.
During the rescue, Garcia and his neighbours had to plead with the flood survivor not to give up holding onto the makeshift life-saving equipment.
She came close to fainting several times during the terrifying ordeal and later said how her energy was waning and she feared she could not hold on anymore.
“During those three and a half hours she was telling me she didn’t have the strength to hold out and she was going to let herself be carried away by the water,” Garcia recalled when speaking on Spanish TV.
“I told her she had to hold on and think of her family.
“The truth is that I was yelling at her till I nearly had no voice left, shouting out encouragement. My son and other neighbours did the same.
“It’s a miracle the woman is still alive,” he added.
He and his neighbours were alerted to the elderly woman after hearing “cries for help.”
“My son and I managed to jump down to the terrace of her flat which is a ground floor flat and I threw some sheets we’d knotted together to her and told her to grab hold of them with her hands as best she could which she did,” Garcia explained.
“My son with another similar mix of knotted blankets managed to get them between her legs and that’s how we managed to stabilise her so the current didn’t sweep her away.”
Footage of the moment showed the neighbours desperately clinging to the ropes while hanging out of the window of the building while the woman fought against the water.
Brit survives floods after escaping from car
BRIT Karen Loftus and her husband survived the flooding after climbing out of her car window, Sky News reports.
The Dorset woman says she is “lucky to be alive” after being hit by the heavy rain while driving south from their home in Alicante.
Motorway traffic they were travelling on came to a standstill before they realised the bridge ahead of them had been washed away.
Within 10 minutes water started lapping at the car and people were smashing their windows to escape.
She said cars began to float down the road that had turned into a river.
Karen said: “Just after we got out of the car, another car floated on top of our car.
“It was raging, cars were floating about, people were screaming.”
The pair managed to climb out of the car’s window with the water at chest height before they were picked up by a lorry.
She said: “It was just like a disaster movie. You know when you think ‘I could die here’. It was so utterly scary.”
“I was like that for the next three and a half, four hours, holding in one hand the knotted sheets she was clinging onto that were keeping her head above the water and with the other the rope made out of bed sheets that were between her legs so she didn’t drown and the current didn’t take her away,” the police officer said.
“There were moments when she was almost losing consciousness and I had to try to lift her head out of the water as best I could.”
He explained how if she had been swept away, the woman would have struck a three-storey-high pile of cars at the end of the street that piled up in the floods.
After almost four gruelling hours of clinging onto the woman to save her life, Garcia’s son and his neighbour Juan Ramon were able to leave the apartment block to get to the woman after the water dropped.
The pair waded into the waist-high water and got the woman up onto the first floor.
Giving an update on the woman, he said that she is currently stable in intensive care after suffering lung damage.
TRUE BRAVERY
For Garcia, this was his second daring rescue after having already saved one neighbour just moments earlier whose window and front door were smashed through by flood water.
The neighbours made a “makeshift ladder” to enter the lower apartment from where they used the bedsheet rope attached to a dumbbell to haul the other woman to safety.
However, the first attempt to rescue her saw Garcia plunge into the floodwaters before the force of the water meant he had to climb the ladder and hope that the makeshift rope and ladder would hold.
SOLARPIX.COMDuring the rescue, Garcia had to plead with the woman not to give up and let go[/caption]
SOLARPIX.COMA three-storey-high pile of cars was piled further down the street[/caption]
GettyMembers of the fire brigade continue with the search and rescue mission[/caption]
“With my son and other neighbours, with blinds and sheets, we made up ropes and put the ladder in place and then I jumped into the water which at that point was more than six feet deep,” Garcia revealed.
He described the scene as a “war zone” with the region around Valencia being the worst hit by the catastrophe.
Some areas saw a year’s amount of rainfall in just a matter of hours.
FURTHER DEVASTATION
The death toll is expected to rise in the coming hours as soldiers and police reach areas that are still cut off because of the flash flooding.
In addition to this ongoing search and rescue effort, a new red alert weather warning with torrential rain has been issued for the Balearics.
The Spanish province of Huelva received the deadly alert as residents have been chillingly warned to “brace for more fatalities”.
On Friday morning it was confirmed by Valencia Regional Authorities that the death toll had increased to 202.
One of these recorded fatalities includes former Valencia football player José Castillejo, 28.
Stories of heroism and tragedy are continuing to emerge from the devastation including of a desperate father who tried to save his wife and three-month-old daughter before they were swept away before his eyes.
Meanwhile, other footage from the floods showed the moment rescuers airlifted a baby and elderly woman to safety as well as a terrified woman who was found clinging to her dog in the flood waters.
One woman even live-streamed herself from the water as she was clinging to a bush, a video which eventually played a role in saving her life.
Meanwhile, a further 500 soldiers have joined the 1,200 soldiers from Spain‘s Military Emergencies Unit in the search for missing people as the country braces for further devastation.
Tuesday’s flash floods are one of the worst natural disasters in Spain’s living history.
Why was Spain hit by flooding?
Spain was hit by flash floods after the east of the country was hit by a meteorological phenomena known as a ‘DANA’.
A DANA, or a ‘cold drop’ is technically a system where there is an isolated depression in the atmosphere is at high levels.
In layman’s terms, more warm and moist Mediterranean air than usual was sucked high into the atmosphere after a cold system hit the country from the south.
The easterly wind then pushed all those clouds and rain into eastern Spain.
Three to four months of rain fell in some places over the space of 24 hours.
The DANA system hit southern Spain as it arrived from Morocco yesterday and is now expected to head west over southern Portugal.
Alicante CouncilShocking footage showed the moment a baby was saved from the catastrophic flash floods[/caption]
Cover ImagesThe dog owner struggled to swim as the floodwater kept flowing ruthlessly[/caption]
APDevastated residents look at an area affected by floods in Chiva, Spain[/caption] Published: [#item_custom_pubDate]
