Spain: Unprecedented Flooding

Starting in Valencia, wide areas of Spain have been hit by torrential rains and flash flooding. Emergency services are overwhelmed and there are complaints of lack of intervention as well as looting.

At least 95 people have died in the worst rainstorm for decades in Spain. On Tuesday 29 October, Valencia had more than 30 centimeters of rain in less than four hours. The rain on Tuesday morning was first welcomed after months of devastating draught in Spain, but later in the day it became a nightmare with the river Turia overflowing its banks and protective embankment walls and flash floods sent cars, containers and debris rushing down the road that quickly became a roaring river in many places. Tributaries and other rivers overflowed in the same way, causing deaths and severe damages that are unprecedented. The quick and intense flooding completely overwhelmed the rescue services #bomberos of the city and province.

The area is now in a state of emergency and local politicians call for disaster status while central government in Madrid call for calm.

Police helicopter footage from Valencia, Spain 30 October 2024

Worst hit are the low-lying areas of the city of Valencia, along the river Turia that overflowed all the normal runoff terrain and in a snap, also the walls surrounding it. The resulting flash flooding overrun motorways and streets in large parts of the city. Flooding was also rampant in the hinterland and in the mountain villages, where emergency services struggled to evacuate inhabitants, including elderly and disabled people, as houses and other structures got damaged by flash floods that carried debris and large bounders down the mountain.

The Minister for Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, has announced three days of mourning and that the Government will declare the area as “highly affected” by the cold drop (DANA) and has promised to provide “all aid” from the state and European funds, as quoted in the national Spanish newspaper El Pais. Defence has mobilized air resources, military psychologists and dogs trained to locate corpses. Dozens of people have spent the night in Valencia on top of trucks or cars, on the roofs of shops or petrol stations, or trapped in their vehicles on jammed roads until they have been rescued. The rains have caused power outages affecting 115,000 people, road closures and the suspension of the high-speed rail service between Madrid and the Valencian Community and the Mediterranean corridor towards Barcelona. The storm is moving to Extremadura, southern Tarragona and western Andalusia, where Cadiz is on red alert due to the risk of water overflow.

The downpour was unusually strong, even if such isolated rainfalls are common for this time of the year on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. Usually called a cold drop (gota fría), since the year 2000 these very strong occurrences have earned the new meteorological term DANA, Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos or ‘High Altitude Isolated Depression’ with the addition ‘formed by cold air’. It happens when cold air is pushed over the warm Mediterranean waters and causes strong evaporation. This is the way rainclouds form in many cases, but because of unusually high temperature differences, it creates extreme amounts of rain when the clouds move inland.

This DANA was the strongest seen in Spain, and it is even not over yet because warnings have been issued for other areas like Andalucía in the south. Now, the problem is that it seems the meteorological agency @AEMET_Esp was very late at issuing flooding warnings before the Tuesday disaster event. On social media, some users are complaining that the warning came after the ‘cars have been floating for 2 hours’. The pictures from yesterday clearly shows that the flooded areas had not been evacuated, at least far from empty. There were people and cars in the streets when the water arrived and flushed people, cars, buses and containers down the road.

Admittedly, high level atmospheric turbulence is more difficult to predict than visible rotating storm systems such as hurricanes, but the effects are just as devastating as seen here in the province of Valencia.

From Twitter/X