Search operations for victims continue Thursday in southeastern Spain. The region is in shock after the worst floods in more than fifty years in the country, which left at least 95 dead and many missing.
Nearly a thousand soldiers are deployed on the ground, mainly in the Valencia region, alongside firefighters, police and rescue workers who are seeking to locate possible survivors and are working to clear the disaster areas.
The latest report communicated by the authorities shows 95 deaths, including 92 in the community of Valencia, the hardest hit. Two other deaths were recorded in the neighboring region of Castile-La Mancha, and a third in Andalusia.
This figure, the highest since floods which left 300 dead in October 1973 in the country, “will increase” because there are still “many missing”, however warned Wednesday evening the Minister of Territorial Policy Ángel Victor Torres.
Sánchez expected on site
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who declared three days of national mourning, is due to travel to Valencia at 10:30 a.m., where he will visit the Relief Coordination Center (Cecopi).
In a brief televised speech on Wednesday, the socialist leader assured that the government would not leave the victims “alone”, while calling on the region's inhabitants to remain vigilant.
Rescue services will now “enter the second stage”, consisting of finding the missing people, Defense Minister Margarita Robles underlined Wednesday evening, specifying that their number remained “unknown”.
Mud and debris
At dawn on Thursday, thousands of people were still without electricity in the Valencia region, according to emergency services. Many roads also remain closed, while countless car wrecks litter the roads, covered in mud and debris.
“I never thought I would experience this,” Eliu Sanchez, a resident of Sedavi, a town of 10,000 inhabitants devastated by bad weather, told AFP, recounting a nightmarish night.
“We saw a young man in a vacant lot,” taking refuge on the roof of his car,” says this 32-year-old electrician. “He tried to jump” onto another vehicle, but the current “took him away” .
According to the authorities, one of the most affected localities is Paiporta, in the southern suburbs of Valencia, where around forty people died, including a mother and her three-month-old baby, swept away by the current.
Hundreds of rescue operations
The president of the Valencia region, Carlos Manzón, said Wednesday evening that emergency services had carried out “200 land and 70 air rescue operations” with helicopters during the day.
He also specified that emergency services had managed to reach all of the affected areas, while several villages remained cut off from the rest of the country for a good part of the day on Wednesday.
According to the Aemet meteorological agency, more than 300 liters of water per square meter fell overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in several towns in the Valencia region, with a peak of 491 liters in the small village of Chiva. This is the equivalent of “a year’s worth of precipitation,” she said.
Late alert
The Spanish press, which describes these bad weather as “floods of the century”, began to question the responsiveness of the authorities: the alert message from the Civil Protection service to residents was in fact sent on Tuesday after 8:00 p.m., so that Aemet had issued a “red alert” in the morning.
The Valencia region and the Spanish Mediterranean coast in general regularly experience, in autumn, the phenomenon known as “gota fria” (“cold drop”), an isolated depression at high altitude which causes sudden and extremely violent rains, sometimes for several days.
Climatic shift in question
Scientists have been warning for several years that extreme weather events, such as heat waves and storms, are both becoming more frequent and more intense due to climate change.
“These flash floods in Spain are another terrible reminder of global warming and its chaotic nature,” said Jess Neumann, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, in a note.
This article was automatically published. Sources: ats / afp