Police Use Paddleboard to Rescue 93-Year-Old Woman From Flooded Home

A 93-year-old woman trapped in her flooded home was carried to safety on a paddleboard by police officers wading through waist-deep water in Gandia on Monday, October 19, as Storm Adam swamped the Valencian coastal city.

Footage released by Spain’s National Police shows the woman, named only as Teresa, lying on her back on a white and yellow inflatable paddleboard, her head resting on a yellow cushion and her body covered by a white blanket. Officers in orange helmets and police jackets, along with a man in a high-visibility vest and a neighbor in a T-shirt and shorts, guide the board out of a flooded courtyard, where a table, chairs and a motorbike are partly underwater, and down a street where the water reaches the front grille of a parked SUV. One officer holds an umbrella over her to keep off the rain as the group moves slowly through the water. “In Teresa’s house, the water reached 1.5 meters high. Our officers got hold of a paddleboard and managed to rescue her in time,” the police said.

According to the police, officers patrolling the Venecia area of Gandia, one of the neighborhoods worst hit by the flooding, received an emergency call about a woman trapped in her home with more than a meter and a half of water inside. They walked about 500 meters to the house with the water up to their chests and found the woman, who has reduced mobility, showing signs of hypothermia. After wrapping her in a coat, they placed her on the paddleboard and took her to a four-wheel-drive vehicle, which carried her to a hospital for treatment. The same morning, officers rescued 17 residents in the nearby town of Bellreguard.

Gandia’s city council said around 500 liters of rain per square meter had fallen on the city and its beach between Sunday and the early hours of Monday, flooding many streets and residential areas close to the sea and cutting off routes into the city. Across the La Safor district and the neighboring Marina Alta, more than 700 liters per square meter fell in places, 145 municipalities were confined, and regional emergencies chief Juan Carlos Valderrama said more than 1,000 rescues had been carried out by air and on the ground in what he called the third most intense rainfall ever recorded in the Valencia region.

The storm has been blamed for three deaths in the Valencia region, two in the nearby town of Oliva and one in Sagunto, with a fourth death reported in Barcelona.