Spain searches storm-ravaged city as death toll surpasses 200

Spanish rescue teams are searching for dozens of missing people in the flood-hit city of Paiporta as the death toll from this week’s storms surpassed 200.

Paiporta, just inland from Valencia on Spain’s east coast, is still largely inaccessible, leaving many of its 27,000 residents trapped without water or electricity. The national government increased the number of soldiers deployed to assist emergency services to 2,000, according to General Fernando Carrillo, who’s leading a special military unit in the region.

“I left the General Air Academy 36 years ago, and believe me when I tell you that I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said in a television interview. “I have never seen this degree of desolation.”

Record rains triggered Spain’s largest natural disaster in more than six decades as rivers in Valencia overflowed, flooding buildings and destroying roads and bridges. So far, there have been 202 fatalities in the region, plus three in other parts of the country. The death toll now exceeds that from the floods which struck parts of western Germany around the Ahr River in 2021.

Such extreme storms, known in Spain as “danas,” are likely to become more common as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of heat waves. Record temperatures in the Mediterranean are strengthening their effects.

The city of Valencia was spared the brunt of the damage thanks to river-rerouting measures that were implemented after a devastating storm in 1957 killed as many as 100 people. Places such as Paiporta did not have any such protection, according to Luis Mediero, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Rains have subsided in Valencia but a yellow alert is still in place. Further north, there are orange warnings for severe rain in the provinces of Tarragona and Castellon, according to national forecaster Aemet. There is also a red alert for rain in Huelva on Spain’s southwest coast.

“The magnitude of the catastrophe is unprecedented,” Transport Minister Oscar Puente said in an interview with public radio RNE Friday. “There are many places that cannot be accessed by any type of vehicle.”

The national government has started emergency works on an overpass that collapsed on the A-7 highway outside Valencia. Daily traffic on the key part of the city’s ring road exceeds 77,000 cars, which can’t be redirected.

In addition to local roads, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) of national highways in the region have been affected and parts of the rail network have been destroyed, the minister said. It will take several months to rebuild.

World Weather Attribution, a scientific organization that studies how climate change influences extreme weather events, said this week’s rain in Valencia was 12% heavier and twice as likely compared to the cooler pre-industrial climate.

“Historical weather observations indicate that one-day bursts of rain in this region are increasing as fossil-fuel emissions heat the climate,” WWA said in a report.

The torrential rain this week centered on the city of Utiel, some 100 kilometers inland from the city of Valencia. One inland town, Chiva, saw as much rain in eight hours as it normally gets in a year, according to the national weather agency.

Rain then streamed down to the coast. While the city of Valencia — Spain’s third-largest and the region’s namesake — wasn’t as badly harmed as parts of its metropolitan area, suburban towns such as Paiporta suffered dramatically.

Spain’s interior minister is joining the regional crisis committee, which means the central government is effectively taking control. Under the country’s decentralized political system, regional governments have primary oversight for such emergencies and Valencia’s president, Carlos Manzon of the conservative People’s Party, has been leading rescue efforts so far.

Questions are being asked about the efficiency of Spain’s storm alert procedures. Although the national weather system issued a red alert early on Tuesday, the Valencia government didn’t send out a mass alarm via mobile phones until around 8 p.m. By then, heavy rain was already falling and many people were out on the streets.

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—With assistance from Clara Hernanz Lizarraga, Thomas Gualtieri and Julius Domoney.