“The worst is over”: the Spanish Meteorological Agency on Thursday lifted its red alert for bad weather in the south and east of Spain, after fears aroused by the heavy precipitation that fell on areas devastated by catastrophic floods in October 29.
AEMET downgraded to the “orange” level its alert for the Andalusian province of Malaga (south) and the region of Valencia (east), where the memory of the floods which left at least 224 dead two weeks ago raised fears of the worse for the victims.
The public agency had placed these two regions on red alert on Wednesday evening, the maximum possible level, due to an “extreme” risk of flooding linked to the presence of a new “cold drop”, an isolated depression at high altitude quite common in autumn on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.
According to AEMET, torrential rains did indeed fall during the night from Wednesday to Thursday, with accumulations of 110 liters of water per square meter (110 millimeters) in Alcudia de Veo, in the hinterland of Valencia , and 88 l per m3 (88 mm) in Chiva, a village already hit by the floods at the end of October.
But this heavy rainfall caused little damage, even if streets were flooded and roads were occasionally cut, both in Andalusia and in the Valencia region. Above all, they did not cause any new victims, according to the authorities.
“Speed of evacuations”
Due to these new bad weather conditions, the regional government of Valencia announced on Wednesday a series of preventive measures in a total of 163 municipalities, with class closures and traffic restrictions.
In Malaga, where air traffic was severely disrupted on Wednesday, more than 4,200 people were preemptively evacuated, mainly near the Guadalhorce, a river threatened with overflowing. School has also been suspended for nearly 500,000 schoolchildren.
“I know that this has created problems for many families” but “prevention is better than cure,” justified the president of the Andalusian region, Juanma Moreno, on Thursday.
For Jess Neumann, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, “the speed of the evacuations probably saved many lives.” This “shows the extent to which it is possible and necessary to act quickly when alerts are issued,” he judged in an analytical note.
26 foreign victims
On Thursday, the beginnings of a return to normal were nevertheless visible in the areas concerned. In Malaga, the Billie-Jean-King Cup tennis tournament was able to begin, after a 24-hour postponement due to rain.
In the Valencia region, restrictions on the movement of private cars were also lifted, while rail traffic with Madrid resumed at the end of the morning, for the first time in two weeks.
This return to normal is, however, more complicated in the areas ravaged by the floods of October 29, where the clearance work and restoration of infrastructure continues, as does the search for the 16 people still missing.
The latter is concentrated “on a strip 200 kilometers long and 60 kilometers wide”, particularly near the mouth of the Turia river, where the bodies could have been carried by the waves, said Rosa Touris, spokesperson for the CECOPI, emergency committee set up after the floods.
The torrential rains which devastated the south-east on October 29 led to the death of at least 26 people of foreign nationality out of the 216 deaths recorded in the administrative region of Valencia alone, the most affected, according to an official report published Thursday which also specifies that almost half of these victims were 70 years old or older.
Among these 26 foreigners who lost their lives, 9 Romanians, 4 Moroccans, 4 Chinese, 2 British, a Ukrainian, a Dutch, a Tunisian, an Ecuadorian, a Venezuelan, a Colombian and a Paraguayan.
In Valencia, the hearing of the president of the region Carlos Mazón, supposed to explain Thursday before the regional parliament on his management of the disaster, was postponed until Friday due to bad weather.
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