Mud-caked volunteers clear flood debris in a Spanish town as authorities struggle to respond

CHIVA, Spain. (AP) – Mud cakes her boots, splatters her leggings and the gloves that hold her broom. Brown spots cover her cheeks with freckles.

The mud covering Alicia Montero is the distinctive uniform of the makeshift army of volunteers who spent a third day on Friday shoveling and sweeping away the dirt and debris that subsequently filled the small town of Chiva, Valencia Flash floods swept across the region. Spain's deadliest natural disaster in living memory has claimed at least 205 lives, countless people are still missing and countless lives are in ruins.

As police officers and rescue workers Continue the grim search for corpsesAuthorities appear overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster, and survivors are relying on the esprit de corps of volunteers rushing in to fill the void.

While hundreds of people streamed from the city of Valencia to the suburbs in cars and on foot to help, Montero and her friends live in Chiva, where at least seven people died on Tuesday The storm unleashed its fury.

“I never thought this could happen. It moves me to see my city in this form,” Montero told The Associated Press. “We always had fall storms, but nothing like this.”

She says she could barely escape the floods as she drove home Tuesday, and if she had gotten back on the road five minutes later, she says she would have been swept away like dozens of cars still stranded on the highway that forms a flood zone between her town and the city Valencia, about 30 kilometers (18 miles) to the east.

Tractors rumble through the narrow streets of Chiva, stopping only briefly or slowing down to allow people to toss broken doors, broken furniture and other debris into beds before making their way upstairs, away from the epicenter of the destruction.

Meanwhile, residents and volunteers shovel and sweep away the layers of mud that cover the floors of destroyed businesses and homes, and the air is full of frenetic energy. People carry buckets of water from a large ornamental pool in a city square to wash away the mud. Three little boys take a break to kick a soccer ball on the slippery road.

Newcomers are easy to spot because they're clean, but a few steps further on Chiva's slippery cobblestones they're quickly marked with mud.

“How many hours have we been at this?” Who knows?” says Montero as he takes a breather from cleaning near a canyon that just days before was filled with a crushing wall of water.

“We work, stop eating a sandwich they give us and keep working.”

Death by mud

“So much mud on the streets, as if the water had just disappeared from the face of the earth,” is how Charles Dickens describes 19th-century London in his novel “Bleak House.”

In Chiva and other parts of Valencia – Paiporta, Masanasa, Barrio de la Torre, Alfafar – mud has become synonymous with death and destruction. The mud flowed into homes and crawled into cars, causing some vehicles to fall apart and others to be slightly lifted and moved.

This week's storm dumped more rain in Chiva in eight hours than in the previous 20 months. The flooding caused flooding that collapsed two of the four bridges in the city and made a third bridge unsafe to cross. The water has now receded and the Guardia Civil divers have disappeared, but police continue to search the gorge, destroying houses and underground car parks, fearing the mud could hide more bodies.

“Entire houses have disappeared. We don’t know if there were people there or not,” Mayor Amparo Fort told RNE Radio.

Citizens are filling the gap left by the authorities

So many people are coming to help the hardest-hit areas that authorities have asked them not to drive or walk because they are blocking roads needed for emergency services.

“It is very important that you return home,” said regional president Carlos Mazón, thanking the volunteers for their benevolence. The regional government has asked volunteers to gather at a large cultural center in the city on Saturday morning to organize work teams and transport.

Power was finally restored to Chiva's 20,000 residents on Thursday evening and there is still no running water. Local governments are distributing water, food and essential items to flash flood-affected cities across Valencia, and the Red Cross is using its extensive aid network to help those affected.

There were Guardia Civil police officers in Chiva Searching collapsed houses and the ravine for bodiesand direct traffic. Firefighters ensure that buildings are safe. Around 500 soldiers have been deployed to the Valencia region to deliver water and essential supplies to those in need, and more are on the way.

However, so far there are no military units in Khiva, where the wave of solidarity among average citizens underscores the lack of official help. The atmosphere is as if the townspeople are just getting on with it.

A man cries at the Astoria movie theater, which has been converted into a supply depot. The theater is full of water bottles and fruit. People make sandwiches. A group of young men arrive and set down water bottles before picking up shovels and brooms and joining the fight.

On the other side of the town hall square, a sign says that everyone can drink two bottles of water a day. Volunteers distribute baguette sandwiches.

María Teresa Sánchez is cleaning up the bakery, which has been in the family for five generations, and hopes it can survive. However, she's not sure her 100-year-old oven can be saved.

“Chiva will take a long time to recover from this,” she said. “But it’s true that we didn’t feel alone. We help each other. And in the end, that's really what we assume, this ghost of an isolated town where no one has come to help, and yet you see how we're all out on the streets? That’s the light of this story.”

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Medrano reported from Madrid. Associated Press writers Colleen Barry in Milan and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.