Almost a thousand soldiers were mobilized, mainly in the region of Valencia, eastern Spain, alongside firefighters, police and rescuers trying to locate any survivors and remove the debris caused by the storm.
The most recent balance announced by the authorities cites 95 deaths, 92 of them in the Valencian Community, the most affected region. Two people died in neighboring Castilla-La Mancha and one in the Andalusia region.
The number of victims, the highest in the country since the floods that left 300 dead in October 1973, “will increase” because there are still many missing, admitted the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres.
The country’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, declared three days of national mourning and will visit the rescue coordination center in Valencia this Thursday.
In a brief speech on Wednesday, the socialist stated that the government will not leave affected people alone and asked residents of the region to remain alert.
Emergency teams must begin “the second phase, search and rescue,” Defense Minister Margarita Robles declared on Wednesday. She also said there is a “big unknown” about the number of people missing.
This Thursday, thousands of people remained without access to electricity in the Valencian Community.
Many highways remain blocked, some due to the accumulation of vehicles swept away by water, covered in mud and debris.
“I never thought about experiencing something like this,” Eliu Sánchez, a resident of Sedaví, a municipality of 10,000 inhabitants that was devastated by the storms, told AFP. He cited a “nightmarish night”.
“We saw a young man who was in an open area and was carried away by the current”, says the 32-year-old electrician. “He was on top of the car, tried to jump into another one, but was dragged away.”
Authorities reported that one of the most affected locations is Paiporta, on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia. Almost 40 people died at the scene, including a mother and her three-month-old baby who were swept away by the current.
The regional president of the Valencian Community, Carlos Mazón, said on Wednesday that emergency services carried out “200 ground rescues and 70 air rescues” with helicopters during the day.
He also explained that rescuers managed to reach all affected areas after several locations were isolated for much of the day.
– “Terrible memory” –
According to the meteorological agency AEMET, between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, several cities in the region received more than 300 liters of water per square meter. The maximum level was recorded in the small city of Chiva, with 491 liters, equivalent to “a year of rain”.
The Spanish press, which describes the episode as the “flood of the century”, is beginning to question the authorities’ reaction: the alert message from the civil protection service was sent on Tuesday at 8pm, although AEMET declared a “red alert” during the morning.
The Valencian Community and the Spanish Mediterranean coast in general face regularly during autumn (northern hemisphere, spring in Brazil) the phenomenon of “cold drop”, an isolated depression at high altitude that causes sudden and extremely violent rains, on some occasions for several days.
Scientists have been warning for many years that extreme meteorological phenomena, such as heat waves or this type of storm, are increasingly frequent and intense due to climate change.
“The flash floods in Spain are a terrifying new reminder of climate change and its chaotic nature,” said Jess Neumann, professor of Hydrology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom.
*With AFP
