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'We will cling to hope', says leader of flood-hit village
As we’ve been reporting this morning, there are ongoing efforts to find survivors.
However, Emiliano García-Page, the president of the Castilla La-Mancha communitieas, has said part of the hard-hit village of Letur remains inaccessible to crews.
The region said yesterday two people had died. Five residents of Letur remained missing.
“In Letur, specifically, it still hasn’t been possible to access part of the village,” García-Page told reporters.
“The prognosis is pessimistic, but until we find people and confirm things, we will cling to hope.”
Analysis: deadly floods and droughts are two faces of the climate crisis coin
Ajit Niranjan
Residents of Chiva, a small town on the outskirts of Valencia, can expect a grim future of worsening drought as the planet heats up and the country dries out. But on Tuesday, they also witnessed a year’s worth of rainfall in a matter of hours.
The torrential rains that flooded southern and eastern Spain on Tuesday night, ripping away bridges and tearing through towns, have killed scores of people. Fossil fuel pollution plays a role in warping both extremes of the water cycle: heat evaporates water, leaving people and plants parched, but hot air can hold more moisture, increasing the potential for catastrophic downpours.
“Droughts and floods are the two sides of the same climate change coin,” said Stefano Materia, an Italian climate scientist at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre. He said studies had linked droughts in the Mediterranean with the climate emergency through changes in atmospheric circulation at the same time that global temperature rise had severely heated the region.
Read on here:
Authorities have confirmed a mother and baby were among the victims swept away in yesterday’s floods in the Valencia suburbs.
Around 40 people were confirmed to have died in Paiporta alone.
Tens of thousands of homes across the area are still without electricity and drinking water and many roads were blocked by hundreds of cars and trucks swept away in sudden torrents.
Emergency services carried out 200 rescues on the ground and 70 aerial evacuations on Wednesday, said Valencia regional government chief Carlos Mazon.
This week’s floods were Spain’s worst since 1996, when 87 people died after torrential rain hit a campsite in the Pyrenees mountains. Europe’s most recent catastrophic floods came in July 2021, killing 243 people in Germany, Belgium, Romania, Italy and Austria.
The intense rain has been attributed to a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or “cold drop”, which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean. This creates atmospheric instability, causing warm, saturated air to rise rapidly, leading to heavy rain and thunderstorms.
Experts say the warming of the Mediterranean, which increases water evaporation, plays a key role in making torrential rains more severe.
Here are some of the latest images from affected areas in Spain:
‘We were trapped like rats’: floods bring devastation and despair
Sam Jones
The gratitude that greeted Tuesday’s dawn downpours was short-lived in Utiel. When the longed-for rains finally reached the town in the drought-stricken eastern Spanish region of Valencia, they were merciless in their abundance.
“People were very happy at first because they’d been praying for rain as their lands needed water,” said Remedios, who owns a bar in Utiel. “But by 12 o’clock, this storm had really hit and we were all pretty terrified.”
Trapped in the bar, she and a handful of her customers could only sit and watch as Spain’s worst flooding in almost 30 years caused the Magro River to overflow its banks, trapping some residents in their homes and sending cars and rubbish bins surging through the streets on muddy flood waters.
“The rising waters brought mud and stones with them and they were so strong that they broke the surface of the road,” said Remedios, who gave only her first name.
“The tunnel that leads into the town was half-full of mud, trees were down and there were cars and rubbish containers rolling down the streets. My outside terrace has been destroyed – the chairs and shades were all swept away. It’s just a disaster.”
By Wednesday afternoon, the death toll in Valencia and the neighbouring regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía stood at 95 . Utiel’s mayor, Ricardo Gabaldón, told Las Provincias newspaper that some of the town’s residents had not survived the floods, but was unable to provide an exact number.
Hours earlier, Gabaldón had told Spain’s national broadcaster, RTVE, that Tuesday had been the worst day of his life. “We were trapped like rats,” he said. “Cars and rubbish containers were flowing down the streets. The water was rising to 3 metres.”
Rescue personnel and more than 1,100 soldiers from Spain’s emergency response units have been deployed to affected areas. Spain’s central government has also set up a crisis committee to coordinate rescue efforts.
As the search for missing people continues, motorists are urged to stay off the roads and away from swollen rivers amid warnings that the severe weather was not over and that the number of deaths could still rise.
Search for survivors continues as more rain forecast
Rescue workers in Spain continued to search for more victims after deadly floods, as questions were raised about how one of the world’s most developed nations failed to respond adequately to an extreme storm.
Torrential rains that began at the start of the week sparked flooding that has left at least 95 people dead, the deadliest such disaster in the western European country since 1973.
Defence minister Margarita Robles told Cadena Ser radio station that a military unit specialised in rescue operations would on Thursday start combing through the mud and debris with sniffer dogs in the worst-hit areas.
Asked if the number of victims was likely to increase, she said: “Unfortunately we are not optimistic”.
The teams have brought with them 50 mobile morgues.
More heavy rain was predicted for the hardest-hit eastern Valencia region and other areas on the north-east coast on today.
