What you need to know about unprecedented floods that have killed more than 200 people in Spain

MADRID (AP) — In a matter of minutes, floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain on Tuesday swept away everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of people lost their livelihoods.

After three days of power 205 bodies found – 202 of them in eastern Valencia alone, two in Castilla-La Mancha and one in Andalusia – and continue to search for an unknown number of missing people.

Warning of approaching rain, people are clearing away thick layers of mud that have covered homes, streets and highways littered with debris, while facing power and water outages and shortages of some basic goods. Some of the cars that had been tossed together by the water or crashed into buildings still had bodies inside them, awaiting identification.

Here are a few things to know about Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory:

What’s happened?

The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and created waves of water in the Poio River bed that overflowed the river’s banks, catching people by surprise as they continued their daily lives, with many returning home from work on Tuesday evening.

In an instant, muddy water covered roads, railways and entered homes and businesses in villages on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia. Drivers of vehicles converted into boats had to hide on the roofs of cars, while residents tried to take cover on higher ground.

The downpour was stunning. Spain’s National Meteorological Service said the worst-hit region of Chiva received more rain in eight hours than in the previous 20 months. calling the flood “extraordinary.”

When the authorities sent notification to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the phenomenon and asking them to stay at home, many were already on the road, working or were flooded with water in low-lying areas or garages, which became death traps.

Why did these massive floods happen?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two possible connections. human-caused climate change. First, warmer air traps and then releases more rain. Another possibility is possible changes in the jet stream—the river of air over land that moves weather systems around the globe—that give rise to extreme weather conditions.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding was a cut-off, lower-pressure storm system that resulted from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. This system simply stalled over the region and dumped rain. Meteorologists say this happens so often that in Spain they are called DANA, the Spanish acronym for the system.

And here there is an unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. Mid-August had the highest 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 London.

The extreme weather event comes after Spain struggled with prolonged drought in 2022 and 2023. Experts say that Drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

Has this happened before?

Spain’s Mediterranean coast is accustomed to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the worst flash flooding in recent memory.

Elderly people in Paiport, the epicenter of the tragedy, say Tuesday’s floods were three times worse than in 1957, killing at least 81 people and the worst in the eastern tourism region’s history. This episode led to the redirection of the Turia watercourse, meaning that most of the city was spared these floods.

Valencia experienced two more major DANAs in the 1980s: one in 1982 that killed around 30 people, and another five years later that broke rainfall records.

This week’s flash floods also became the deadliest natural tragedy in Spanish history, surpassing the flood that swept away a camp along the Gallego River in Biscas in northwestern Spain, killing 87 people in August 1996.

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.