Moment ‘hero’ teacher smashes door with table leg to rescue kids as young as 5 trapped in school by rising Spain floods
A TEACHER caught with his pupils in the Spanish floods desperately smashed a glass door with a table leg to escape a torrent of water.
Daniel Burguet, a director of an English school outside Valencia, saved a group of children when rising water threatened to drown them.
On Tuesday evening he was looking after five pupils who were yet to be picked up by their parents when the deluge arrived.
Streets quickly turned into rivers, over 200 people were killed, and areas have been left caked in mud.
Burguet’s school was in Paiporta – one of the worst hit areas of the disaster and where King Felipe visited on Sunday.
Footage shows Burguet up to his chest in brown, rushing water, smashing through a glass door next to the school to open it.
He told news channel TVE that in the classroom were two teachers, his daughter, and three other children aged between 11 and four.
Moments before, the strength of the water smashed the window at the front of his school, flooding rooms with the water and threatening to kill the children.
Burguet and the other adults placed the children on top of tables in the rooms, but he feared the water would keep rising.
He said: “Once we had let all the water in, when the current stopped we decided to open the door and what I did was go outside to see where to leave the kids.”
Burguet went outside to see the glass door next door and smashed it open with the table leg.
He then went back inside the school and pulled the kids out, carrying the children one-by-one out into the water and then through the door.
Once Burguet gets the students to the door, they are able to scramble themselves inside and get out of the water.
He said: “In my head, I only had to survive and save the people inside as well.
“We couldn’t think about anything else. If I hadn’t had the option to break that glass, I wouldn’t be here telling this story.
“I don’t consider myself a hero. Today when I was cleaning the academy a father came crying saying that he owes me his life, but no, he doesn’t owe me his life.”
Angry Spaniards threw mud at King Felipe when he travelled to Paiporta on Sunday as fury grows over the response to the disaster.
Bodyguards opened umbrellas to protect the royals and officials as protesters hurled mud at them and shouted at him and his wife Queen Letizia.
The King did meet survivors, patting two young men on their backs and sharing a quick embrace – with mud stains visible on his black rain coat.
One woman wept and told him she didn’t have food and nappies for her baby while another person begged: “Don’t abandon us.”
A fresh red rain warning has also been put in place for Valencia with more rain set to hit the already soaked city.
The number of people killed by the floods has risen to 211 – and is expected to climb much higher as 2,000 people are still missing across Spain.
Meanwhile, one woman has been found alive after being trapped in a car with her dead sister-in-law for three days.
The unnamed woman is understood to have been rescued from a flooded tunnel in the stricken town of Benetusser – on the outskirts of Valencia.
The region of Valencia is where most of the victims have died so far from the devastating floods.
Rescuers are said to have discovered the woman after hearing her desperate cries for help among the heap of abandoned vehicles.
Search and rescue workers have been going car-to-car as many people were driving home when the flooding hit.
There are also fears that an underground car park in Valencia yet to be searched could now be a “mass grave”.
Gut-wrenching images of Bonaire Shopping Centre near Valencia show escalators leading down to the basement car park underwater.
Reports have emerged of people dying in their garages and in apartment car parks when they tried to move their motors or check they were safe.