Officers Lift Wheelchair User Over Guardrail in Spanish Flood Rescue

Guardia Civil officers and local residents lifted an elderly man in his wheelchair over a roadside guardrail to get him away from flooded homes on Monday, October 19, after Storm Adam’s record rain cut off parts of eastern Spain. Footage released by Spain’s Guardia Civil also shows a dramatic helicopter rescue near the beach in nearby Oliva, where a crew member was lowered by winch to pull a resident from a flooded yard.

The video opens from above as a rescuer in an orange drysuit drops onto the patio of a white house surrounded by deep, muddy water, straps a person into a harness and lifts them up over the roof. In Pego, an officer wades through thigh-deep water, holding up a gray-haired man in a high-visibility vest. Another shot, filmed from the cab of a backhoe, shows it pushing through floodwater that covers the road, with only a stop sign sticking out above the surface. Officers in yellow jackets and civilians, one of them barefoot, then gather around the man in the wheelchair on a grassy verge. “Not there, because this will come off,” one officer warns, telling them to grip the frame underneath. “Let’s pass him over little by little.” They balance the wheels on top of the guardrail and lower him slowly onto the road, then wheel him to a waiting van.

The Guardia Civil said its traffic officers carried out the rescue at homes next to the CV-678 road in Pego, and that a local resident who brought his backhoe was key to reaching the stranded houses. Its air service rescued the person near Oliva beach, and its divers rescued five more people with mobility problems between Oliva and Pego, along with eight dogs cut off by the water.

Pego recorded 681.2 liters per square meter of rain in 24 hours, according to the Avamet weather network, and Mayor Enrique Moll said the town was cut off from about 1 a.m. until 7:30 a.m., with emergency crews stuck at flooded roads. In Oliva, about 200 people were trapped in their homes on Monday morning, and some 40 Guardia Civil patrols and several helicopters were sent in. The Guardia Civil said it had deployed 821 officers across the Valencia region, evacuated 2,100 people and carried out 95 rescues. Storm Adam has killed three people in the region, two in Oliva and one in Sagunto, and a fourth death was reported in Barcelona.