What caused the floods in Spain and what was the response?

Flash floods caused by heavy rainfall in eastern Spain swept away everything in their path earlier this week.

With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of people lost their livelihoods.

Four days later, authorities recovered 211 bodies.

They continued searching Friday for an unknown number of missing people.

Thousands of volunteers helped clear thick layers of mud and debris that still covered homes, streets and roads despite power and water outages and shortages of some essential goods.

Some of the vehicles 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:

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

In the blink of an eye, muddy water covered roads and railways and entered homes and businesses in villages on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia.

Drivers had to hide on the roofs of cars, and residents tried to take cover on higher ground.

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 flooding “extreme.”

When authorities sent out cellphone warnings about the severity of the phenomenon and asked people to stay home, many were already on the road, working or flooded in swales or garages that had become death traps.

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two possible links to 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 they happen so often that in Spain they are called Danas, the Spanish acronym for the system.

There is also the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. In mid-August, the highest surface temperature on record was recorded at 28.47C, said Carola Koenig from the Center for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University London.

The extreme weather event comes as Spain battled prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say drought and flood cycles are increasing as the climate changes.

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 was hit by two other major storms in the 1980s: one in 1982 that killed about 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 Biescas in northeastern Spain, killing 87 people in August 1996.

Management of the crisis, which the Valencian government classifies as level two on a three-point scale, is in the hands of regional authorities, who can turn to the central government for help in mobilizing resources.

At the request of Valencian President Carlos Mason of the conservative People’s Party, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced on Saturday the deployment of 5,000 more soldiers to join rescue efforts, clearing rubble and providing water and food over the weekend.

The government will also send 5,000 more national police officers to the region, Mr. Sanchez said.

Some 2,000 soldiers of the military emergency unit, the army’s first unit for responding to natural disasters and humanitarian crises, are currently involved in the rescue efforts, as well as almost 2,500 gendarmes of the Civil Guard, who carried out 4,500 rescue operations during the floods. and 1,800 national police officers.

As many of the victims said they felt abandoned by authorities, a wave of volunteers took to the streets to help.

Hundreds of people walk miles every day with brooms, shovels, water and basic food supplies to deliver supplies and help clean up the hardest-hit areas.

Mr Sánchez’s government is expected to approve a disaster declaration on Tuesday that will provide quick access to financial aid. Mr. Mazon announced additional economic aid.

Valencia’s regional government has been criticized for not sending out flood warnings to mobile phones until 8pm on Tuesday, when flooding had already begun in some places and well after the national meteorological agency had issued a red warning indicating heavy rainfall .