What you need to know about the floods in Spain that killed more than 200 people

VALENCIA, Spain – 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.

Six days later, authorities recovered 217 bodies, including 213 in the eastern region of Valencia. They continued to search for an unknown number of missing people on Monday with the help of some 5,000 new soldiers who arrived over the weekend.

An angry crowd in the hard-hit Paiporta threw mud and other objects at the Spanish royal familyPrime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials as leaders made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage on Sunday.

More rain is forecast in the disaster areas and further along the Mediterranean coast, where part of the Catalonia region around the city of Tarragona is under red alert.

The Spanish Navy transport ship “Galicia” arrived at the port of Valencia on Monday with 100 marines, helicopters and trucks loaded with food and water to help with the relief effort.

Thousands of volunteers helped clear the thick layers of mud and debris that still covered homes, streets and roads, while at the same time dealing with cuts to drinking water and shortages of some basic goods. Bodies still lay in some vehicles washed away by water or trapped in underground garages, waiting to be identified.

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 instantThe muddy water covered roads and railways and entered homes and businesses in towns and villages on the southern edge 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. called the flood “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia saw no previous rainfall swept away by the wall of water causing the drainage channels to overflow.

When the authorities sent cell phone alerts warned of the severity of the floods and asked people to stay at home; many were already on the road, working or flooded in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became death traps.

Why did these massive flash floods happen?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two possible connections man-made 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, meteorologists say.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. By mid-August it had 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 so drought and flood cycles are increasing with 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.

Some 7,500 soldiers, trucks, heavy road equipment and Chinook helicopters have been deployed, as well as almost 10,000 additional police officers from the National Police and Guardia Civil to help search for bodies, clear thousands of wrecked cars and disperse emergency aid.

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 will approve a disaster declaration on Tuesday that would allow quick access to financial aid. Mazón has announced additional economic aid.

Valencia’s regional government has been heavily 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.