The death toll from flash floods in <a href="https://www.world-today-news.com/league-of-nations-spain-achieves-the-perfect-heist-in-germany-the-young-nugget-fati-marks-the-spirits/" title="League of Nations: Spain achieves the perfect heist in Germany, the young nugget Fati marks the spirits”>Valencia has risen to 104, the worst Spain has faced in more than fifty years.
This increase is not a surprise as since yesterday the Minister of Territorial Policy Ángel Victor Torres had warned that the tragic toll will rise as there are still “many who are missing”.
The death toll is the highest since the October 1973 floods in Spain that killed 300 people, with rescue crews continuing their search for the missing.
Nearly a thousand soldiers have been deployed in the field, mainly in the Valencia region, alongside firefighters, police and rescue workers who are searching for survivors and struggling to clear the affected areas of debris.
Drone footage shows the scale of the devastation
New storm warning in Valencia
In fact, Spanish authorities issued today a new warning for a storm in part of the region of Valencia, in eastern Spain.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who declared three days of national mourning, went to Valencia in the morning to visit the Center for the Coordination of Rescue Operations (Cecopi).
In his brief televised speech yesterday, Sanchez assured that the government will not leave the affected “alone”, and at the same time called on the residents of the area to remain vigilant.
The rescue operations are now “going to the second stage”, which consists of locating the missing, Defense Minister Margarita Robles noted last night, pointing out that their number remains “unknown”.
Today the weather was mild in the worst-hit areas around the city of Valencia, Spain’s third largest, but the weather service Aemet issued the highest level of alert for the province of Castile. Further north in Catalonia, an “orange alert” was issued for the city of Tarragona.
“The bad weather continues! Be careful!”
“There are already very strong storms in the area, especially in northern Castile,” Aemet said in a post on her X account. “The bad weather continues! Be careful!”, he adds, calling on people to avoid traveling in this area.
The floods in Valencia also caused massive damage to the region’s infrastructure, sweeping away bridges, roads, railways and submerging buildings after rivers overflowed.
As of dawn today, thousands of people were still without power in the region, according to emergency services. Many roads also remained blocked, while countless damaged cars swept away by the waters lay on roads that were littered with mud and debris.
“I never thought I would experience something like this,” Eliou Sanchez, a resident of Sendavi, a community of 10,000 that was swept away by the floods, told AFP, describing a nightmarish night.
“We saw a young man in the middle of nowhere who had taken refuge on the roof of his car,” says the 32-year-old electrician. He “tried to jump” onto another car, but was “taken” by the current.
Mother and infant swept away
According to the authorities, one of the worst affected areas is Paiporta, in the southern suburbs of Valencia, where around forty people, including a mother and her three-month-old baby, died when they were swept away by the current.
Valencia district chief Carlos Mantón said last night that rescue crews carried out “200 ground rescue operations and 70 air rescue operations” with helicopters during the day.
He also clarified that rescue services managed to reach all the affected areas, although many villages remained cut off from the rest of the country for much of yesterday.
Over 300 liters of water
According to the meteorological service Aemet, more than 300 liters of water per square meter fell on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in several towns in the Valencia region, with a peak of 491 liters in the small village of Chiva. This quantity corresponds “to one year’s rains”, he clarified.
The Spanish press, characterizing this bad weather as “floods of the century”, began to question the reaction of the authorities: the warning message of the Civil Protection service to residents was sent on Tuesday after 20:00 local time, while the meteorological service Aemet had issued “red alert” already in the morning.
The region of Valencia and the Spanish Mediterranean coast in general often experience the “gotta fria” (cold drop) weather phenomenon in autumn, which causes sudden and extremely heavy rains, sometimes for several days.
Scientists have warned for years that extreme weather events such as heat waves and storms are becoming more intense and more frequent due to climate change.
“These flash floods in Spain are another terrible reminder of climate change and its chaotic nature,” said Jess Neumann, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in Britain.
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