At least 95 people die in flash floods in Spain

The Spanish government has declared three days of mourning from Thursday.

“To those who are looking for their loved ones, all of Spain feels your pain,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised address.

Rescue personnel and more than 1,100 soldiers from Spain’s emergency response units were sent to the affected areas. Spain’s central government has set up a crisis committee to coordinate rescue efforts.

Javier Berenguer, 63, escaped from his bakery in Utiel when crushing water threatened to overwhelm him. He said it rose to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) inside his business, and he fears his livelihood has been destroyed.

“I had to get out of a window as best I could because the water was already up to my shoulders. I took refuge on the first floor with the neighbors and stayed there all night,” Berenguer told The Associated Press. “It cost everything. I have to throw everything out of the bakery, the freezers, ovens, everything.”

María Carmen Martínez, another Utiel resident, witnessed a harrowing rescue operation.

“It was terrible, terrible. “There was a man there who was clinging to a fence and fell and was calling people for help,” she said. “They couldn’t help him until the helicopters came and took him away.”

One town in Valencia, Paiporta, suffered exceptional losses. Mayor Maribel Albalat told RTVE that more than 30 people have died in the city of about 25,000 residents. Among them were six residents of a senior home. News media broadcast images of seniors in chairs and wheelchairs at a nursing home in Paiporta, some screaming in apparent fear as water rose over their knees.

“We don’t know what happened, but within ten minutes the village was flooded with water,” Albalat said.

Spain’s national weather service said it rained more in Valencia in eight hours than in the previous 20 months. called the flood “extraordinary.”

Located south of Barcelona on the Mediterranean Sea, Valencia is a tourist destination known for its beaches, citrus groves and as the origin of the rice dish, paella. The region has gorges and small riverbeds that are completely dry for much of the year, but quickly fill with water when it rains. Many of them pass through populated areas.

As the flooding subsided, thick layers of mud mixed with rubbish made some streets unrecognizable.

“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it is literally destroyed,” Christian Viena, a cafe owner in the Valencian village of Barrio de la Torre, said by telephone. “Everything is a total wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost a foot deep.”

Outside Vienna’s bar, people ventured out to see what they could salvage. Cars were piled up and the streets were filled with clumps of water-soaked branches.

Spain has experienced it similar autumn storms in recent years. Nothing compared to the devastation of the past two days, which is reminiscent of flooding in Germany and Belgium in 2021 killing 230 people.

The death toll is likely to rise as other regions are yet to report casualties and search efforts continue in hard-to-reach places.

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