BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Within minutes, flash floods caused by heavy rains in eastern Spain have 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.
A week later, authorities have recovered 219 bodies – 211 of them in the eastern region of Valencia – and are searching for at least 93 missing people. Police, firefighters and soldiers continued to search Tuesday for an unknown number of missing people.
In many of the more than 70 affected places, most of which are in the southern suburbs of the city of Valencia, people are still facing shortages of basic goods. The water is flowing through the pipes again, but authorities say it is only for cleaning and not suitable for drinking. Lines are forming at makeshift emergency kitchens and food aid stands on streets still covered in mud and rubble.
The Spanish Consortium for Insurance, a public-private entity that pays insurance claims for extreme risks such as floods, said on Tuesday it had received 21,000 claims for home insurance, 12,000 for commercial property and 44,000 for motor vehicles for flood damage. These numbers are expected to grow.
“We can estimate that we are facing the largest payout for a weather-related event that Spain has ever experienced,” said Mirenchu del Valle Schaan, president of the Spanish Association of Insurance Companies.
Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the gigantic task of clearing the mud and countless destroyed cars.
The ground floors of thousands of houses have been destroyed. Bodies still lay in some vehicles washed away by water or trapped in underground garages, waiting to be identified.
Frustration over crisis management boiled over on Sunday when a crowd in hard-hit Paiporta threw mud and other objects at the Spanish royal family, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials as they made their first visit to the epicenter of the flood damage.
Another seven people died in Castilla La Mancha and one in Andalusia.
Here are a few things to know about Spain’s deadliest natural disaster of the century:
What happened?
The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and produced walls of water in the Poyo Canal 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 instant, the muddy water covered roads and railways and entered homes and businesses in towns and villages on Valencia’s southern outskirts. 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, calling the deluge “extraordinary.” Other areas on the southern edge of Valencia city received no rain before being swept away by the wall of water flowing over the drains.
When authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the severity of the floods and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the road, at work or under water in low-lying areas or underground garages, which became a death trap.
Why did these massive flash floods happen?
Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely links to human-induced 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 drought and flood cycles are increasing due to climate change.
“Climate change is deadly, and now we are unfortunately seeing it firsthand,” Sánchez said on Tuesday after announcing a 10.6 billion euro aid package for 78 municipalities where at least one person had died.
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 the region in recent history.
Elderly people in Paiporta, at the epicenter of the tragedy, say the 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.
What was the state’s response?
The management of the crisis is in the hands of the regional Valencian authorities, who have asked the central government for help in mobilizing resources.
About 15,000 soldiers, national police officers and civil guard gendarmerie have been deployed to the area in Spain’s largest peacetime mobilization of military and security forces. Military trucks, heavy road equipment, Chinook helicopters and a Navy transport ship are helping with relief distribution, cleanup and the search for bodies. Two thousand firefighters and 500 local police officers are also involved.
The national government said authorities had rescued more than 36,000 people on Tuesday, restored electricity to 147,000 homes and distributed about 130,000 bottles of water and 21,000 food rations.
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.
The Valencian 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.
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Medrano reported from Madrid.
Joseph Wilson and Teresa Medrano, The Associated Press