What you need to know about Spain’s unprecedented floods that killed more than 200 people

MADRID – Within minutes, flash floods caused by heavy rains in eastern Spain wiped out almost everything in their path. With no time to respond, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were destroyed.

Four days later, authorities recovered 213 bodies – most of them in the eastern region of Valencia. The search continued on Saturday for an unknown number of missing persons.

Thousands of volunteers helped clear the thick layers of mud and debris that still covered homes, streets and roads, as they faced power and water outages and shortages of some basic goods. Bodies still lay in some vehicles that had been washed into piles or crashed into buildings by the water.

Here are a few things you need to know about Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory:

What happened?

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins, producing walls of water in the Poyo riverbed that flooded the banks of the river, leaving people unaware as they went about their daily lives on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday .

In an instant, the muddy water covered roads, railways and entered homes and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia. Drivers had to take shelter on car roofs, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said it rained more in eight hours in the hard-hit town of Chiva than in the previous 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.”

When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the severity of the floods and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, at work or under water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became a death trap.

Why did these massive flash floods happen?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely links to human-induced climate change. One of these is that warmer air holds more rain and then transports it away. The other is possible changes in the jet stream – the river of air over land that moves weather systems around the world – that are producing extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists say the direct cause of the flooding is a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. That system simply parked over the region and dropped rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish abbreviation for the system, according to meteorologists.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. By mid-August, it had recorded the warmest surface temperature on record, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Center for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather conditions came after Spain suffered prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say drought and flood cycles are increasing due to climate change.

Has this happened before?

Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the most powerful flash flood in recent history.

Elderly people in Paiporta, at the epicenter of the tragedy, say Tuesday’s floods were three times worse than those in 1957, which left at least 81 dead. That episode led to the rerouting of the Turia watercourse, which spared a large part of the city from these floods.

Valencia suffered two other major DANAs in the 1980s: one in 1982 with around 30 deaths, and another five years later that broke rainfall records.

The flash floods also surpassed the flood that swept away a campsite along the Gallego River in Biescas, in the northeast, in August 1996, killing 87 people.

What was the state’s response?

The management of the crisis, classified by the Valencian government as level two on a scale of three, is in the hands of the regional authorities, who can ask the central government for help in mobilizing resources.

At the request of Valencian President Carlos Mazón, of the conservative People’s Party, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced on Saturday the deployment of another 5,000 soldiers who will join the rescue efforts, clear the rubble and provide water and food .

The government will also send another 5,000 national police officers to the region, Sánchez said.

Currently, around 2,000 soldiers from the Military Emergency Unit, the army’s first intervention force for natural disasters and humanitarian crises, are involved in the emergency response, as well as almost 2,500 gendarmes from the Guardia Civil – who have rescued 4,500 people – and 1,800 national police officers. officers.

When many of those affected said they felt abandoned by authorities, a wave of volunteers came to help. Carrying brooms, shovels, water and basic food, hundreds of people walked for miles to deliver supplies and help clean up the hardest-hit areas.

Sánchez’s government is expected to approve a disaster declaration on Tuesday that would allow quick access to financial aid. Mazón has announced additional economic aid.

Valencia’s regional government was criticized for not sending flood warnings to mobile phones until 8pm on Tuesday, when flooding had already started in some places and long after the national weather agency issued a red alert indicating heavy rain.

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.