Sagunto firefighters rescue driver whose car fell into an irrigation canal
Firefighters from Sagunto's fire station rescued a driver late on Friday night after his car went off the N-234 road and fell into an irrigation canal in Albalat dels Tarongers, a neighbouring town in the Camp de Morvedre district.
The weekend began with a scare on the N-234 road as it passes through Albalat dels Tarongers, a small town in the Camp de Morvedre district near Sagunto. Firefighters from Sagunto's fire station had to rescue a driver whose car ended up at the bottom of an acequia — a traditional irrigation canal common across the region's farmland. The emergency call came in late on Friday night, around 8:11pm, after the vehicle left the road and fell down a steep slope into the water channel.
According to the firefighters, the driver did not become trapped inside the car, but the depth of the canal and the steepness of the ground made the rescue difficult. Before they could remove him, firefighters first had to immobilise him at the scene as a precaution against possible injury. Only then did they begin the extraction itself, using a rescue stretcher known as a "basket stretcher" — designed to hold an injured person safely on uneven ground — together with a ladder, tools commonly used when the accident site is hard for standard equipment to reach. Once he was freed, the man was handed over to medical services for initial treatment and transport to hospital.
Irrigation canals like this one are a common feature of the farming landscape in Camp de Morvedre, and their presence next to secondary roads adds extra risk when a vehicle leaves the road, especially on stretches without guardrails or with deep ditches like the one the driver crossed. This kind of infrastructure, built to water the region's citrus groves and vegetable fields, is not always marked as clearly as other road hazards, which forces emergency crews to adapt their rescue techniques to each situation — exactly what happened on this stretch of road, which lacked a guardrail along the canal.
The road where the accident happened is not just any local route: the N-234 is part of Spain's State Road Network and connects Sagunto with Burgos over 482 kilometres, largely following the path of an ancient Roman road that once linked Saguntum (the Roman name for Sagunto) with Bilbilis. That historic past contrasts with its current role serving inland towns in the province and offering an alternative when motorway traffic gets heavy.
Albalat dels Tarongers, the municipality where the crash happened, is one of the smallest towns in Camp de Morvedre: according to 2025 census figures from Spain's national statistics institute (INE), it has just over 1,574 residents. Its small size explains why, for an incident of this scale, it is Sagunto's fire station — the main one for the whole district — that responds, as happened in this case.
This is not the first time this month that a traffic accident in the district has required emergency crews to carry out complex extraction manoeuvres: in early September, a similar incident occurred on the V-23 road in Sagunto, where a person was trapped after their vehicle collided with a crane. These are separate incidents, but both happened within the same month and both highlight the physical and technical demands this kind of rescue places on Sagunto's firefighters, who serve not only the town itself but also the surrounding municipalities in the district, including small villages like Albalat dels Tarongers.
Emergency services stress, after incidents like this one, how important it is to adjust speed to road conditions and take extra care on stretches with ditches, canals or steep slopes, especially at night, as was the case here. The fact that the driver was evacuated alive and was never trapped inside the vehicle is credited largely to how quickly the emergency crews reached the scene. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Wikipedia.