Before and after photos show damage from flash floods in Spain

Satellite images show floods stretching from Alzira to Valencia.

This image taken by the American Landsat-8 satellite shows the landscape around Valencia October 8, before the flood, and October 30, after it.

For scale, from the city of Alzira, shown in the lower left corner of both images, to Valencia, shown in the upper left corner, the distance is about 48 miles.

Satellite images show highway destruction in Spain.

Before and after satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies, show widespread destruction throughout the province of Valencia. Shown here is a highway damaged by floodwaters.

As of Thursday, about 300 people were left without escape due to damaged roads, Spain’s state news agency EFE reported. reported.

Flash floods treated cars like Legos, stacking them on top of each other.

The Sedavi area of ​​Valencia is almost unrecognizable in these images taken before and after the floods.

Flood waters turned cars on their sides. flooded roadscut off major roads and damaged many houses. Some had to run to the rooftops to wait for help.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said on Thursday that the government had sent more than 1,800 police officers, 750 civilian guards and 200 soldiers to help with rescue and recovery efforts, EFE reported.

The muddy water turned people, streets and buildings brown.

The bank is in Paiport, south of the city of Valencia, where flooding killed at least 62 people, some of them elderly.

The municipality of Paiport crosses the gorge. When the hurricane hit, the ravine overflowed its banks, flooding the entire central area where old houses and elderly people live, Spanish broadcaster RTVE reported. reported.

Paiporta Mayor Maribel Albalat told RTVE that they received no warning of imminent danger and people were ambushed by flood.

This is the worst flooding Spain has seen in decades, and people were not prepared.

The storm was caused by what is known as a cold drop, where warm air rises quickly to form huge cumulonimbus clouds that can then be released. torrential downpours.

Sudden catastrophic rainfall is an increasingly serious problem around the world. global temperature is risingmainly because warmer air holds more moisture.

In a phenomenon that some scientists call “weather injury“Many parts of the planet fluctuate wildly between severe drought and severe flooding.

“You can really go to any continent, any time of year, and find something in that place,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist studying the phenomenon at the University of California, Los Angeles, told BI in January 2023, after Powerful floods briefly broke California’s drought.

Thousands of people have been rescued, but many remain trapped.

The number of missing people remains unclear, EFE reports. At the same time, about 3,400 people were saved.

As the planet warms over the coming decades, droughts and rainfall are likely to become more and more extreme.

This is one of many reasons why scientists are calling on companies, countries and industries to dramatically reduce their carbon emissions. If business continues as usual, research suggests there will be more such floods in the future.