Floods in Spain: “Normal life will not return for many weeks”

At least 205 people have lost their lives in massive floods earlier this week in Valencia, Spain, as a lack of coordination from authorities begins to anger some citizens.

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“We know that there are several dozen missing people, we sometimes talk about 1000 missing, it turns out that there are still bodies stuck in cars, in garages and there are still searches,” explained Laurence Lemoine, journalist in Valencia and director of Valencia Expat Service.

If soldiers are deployed little by little to the scene to help the victims, the population begins to find that help arrives too late.

“We feel that there is a problem of coordination at the relief level, at the level of the organization of aid,” underlined Ms. Lemoine, who indicated that private initiatives are being formed to go and clean or even carry food.

“What people would like is especially the military, the police because there is sometimes looting that has been seen and then real bulldozers, real equipment,” she mentioned in an interview with LCN, Friday.

She particularly deplored the fact that the new alert system put in place in Spain did not intervene until very late in the day on Tuesday. Some meteorological services also had difficulty assessing the phenomenon, with some radars being out of order.

“Normal life will not return for many weeks and many months for some,” said Ms. Lemoine.