Couple found dead in their car during floods in Spain as death toll passes 200

A missing British couple has been found dead in their car amid the disaster devastating floods across Spain.

According to the BBCDon, 78, and Terri Turner, 74, were last seen in Pedralba on Tuesday, October 29, before heavy rain made landfall in Valencia, Spain, and continued through Wednesday. The Guardian And The independent also reported that the couple was found dead.

They were found on Saturday, November 2, after telling neighbors they were getting out to fill their car with gas. Their daughter, Ruth O’Loughlin, hoped her parents could stay safe under the circumstances.

“We hoped they were still alive and maybe hiding somewhere,” she told the BBC. “We were talking about mom and dad coming over here next year to spend some time with us and we just ended the conversation and I’m really glad I said ‘I love you’ and she said she loved you too loves me.”

Her sister, Renee Turner, spoke to their father on Monday, October 28, and expected to hear back the next day. “Sometimes that is not unusual. We can’t send messages every five minutes for a day or so,” she told the BBC.

Don and Terri’s friends had called O’Loughlin to tell her about her parents’ deaths. “He said ‘Ruth, get your husband,’ I called my husband and he just said ‘Martin, hold your wife,’ and said they had been found and they had been found in their car,” O’Loughlin recalled her parents’ friends.

‘We still don’t know exactly what happened to them. All we can tell from this is that they were together. This is not the way you want your parents to go.”

The couple moved from Staffordshire ten years earlier because they ‘always wanted to live in the sun’.

“They were together. They had great friends there,” O’Loughlin told the BBC. “We took comfort in knowing that they made friends everywhere they went.”

Never miss a story – sign up PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up to date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.

Reuters and the BBC reported that a year’s worth of rainfall hit the ground in eight hours, causing Spain’s deadliest flood in three decades. The rainfall affected southern and eastern Spain, from Malaga to Valencia, according to the Associated press.

Spanish authorities recovered 217 bodies on Monday, November 4, the newspaper reported Associated press. The rainwater flooded the Magro and Turia river basins and the Poyo riverbed, the AP reports, causing the riverbanks to overflow.

The water has washed away roads and railways, flooding homes and businesses, causing people to stand on car roofs or seek higher ground in buildings.

“We are facing a very difficult situation,” Spanish Minister of Territorial Policy Ángel Víctor Torres said via PBS. “The fact that we cannot provide the number of missing persons indicates the scale of the tragedy.”