CHIVA, Spain — killing at least Three days after historic floods ravaged cities across Spain, 205 people, the initial shock gave way to anger, frustration and an outpouring of solidarity on Friday.
Spanish emergency services raised the death toll to at least 205, including 202 in Valencia alone.
Many streets are still blocked by piled-up vehicles and debris, in some cases trapping residents in their homes. In some places, there is still no electricity, running water or stable phone service.
The damage from Tuesday and Wednesday’s storm was reminiscent of the aftermath of a tsunami, with survivors left to pick up the pieces as they mourned their loved ones lost in Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory.
“The situation is unbelievable. It’s a disaster and there is very little help,” said Emilio Cuartero, a resident of v, on the outskirts of Valencia. “We need machines and cranes so that the sites are accessible. We need a lot of help. And bread and water.”
In Chiva, residents were busy clearing debris from muddy streets on Friday. The Valencian city received more rain in eight hours on Tuesday than in the previous 20 months, and water overflowed a gully that crosses the city, destroying roads and the walls of houses.
The mayor, Amparo Fort, told RNE radio that “entire houses have disappeared, we don’t know if there were people inside or not.”
Security forces and soldiers are busy searching for an unknown number of missing people, many of whom fear they are still trapped in wrecks or flooded garages.
“I’ve been there my whole life, all my memories are there, my parents lived there … and now in one night it’s all gone,” Chiva resident Juan Vicente Pérez told The Associated Press near the spot where he lost his home. “If we had waited five more minutes, we wouldn’t be here in this world anymore.”
Before and after satellite images of Valencia illustrated the scale of the disaster, showing the Mediterranean metropolis transformed into a landscape flooded with muddy water. The V-33 highway was completely covered in a thick layer of brown mud.
The tragedy has unleashed a wave of local solidarity. Residents of communities such as Paiporta — where at least 62 people died — and Catarroja have walked miles through sticky mud to Valencia to collect supplies, passing neighbors from unaffected areas who brought water, essential products, shovels or brooms to clear the mud. The sheer number of people who have come to help has prompted authorities to ask them not to drive there, as they are blocking the roads needed by emergency services.
In addition to the contributions of volunteers, associations such as the Red Cross and local councils are distributing food.
And as authorities have repeatedly said, more storms are expected. The Spanish weather agency has issued warnings of heavy rain in Tarragona, Catalonia, and part of the Balearic Islands.
Meanwhile, flood survivors and volunteers are busy with the titanic task of clearing a ubiquitous layer of thick mud. The storm caused power and water outages on Tuesday night, but about 85% of the 155,000 affected customers had power restored by Friday, the utility said in a statement.
“This is a disaster. There are many elderly people who don’t have medicine. There are children who don’t have food. We don’t have milk, we don’t have water. We don’t have access to anything,” a resident of Alfafar, one of the worst-hit towns in southern Valencia, told state television TVE. “No one even came to warn us on the first day.”
Juan Ramón Adsuara, the mayor of Alfafar, said the aid is far from enough for residents stuck in an “extreme situation.”
“There are people living with corpses at home. It’s very sad. We organize ourselves, but we run out of everything,” he told reporters. “We go to Valencia in vans, we buy and we come back, but here we are completely forgotten.”
Running water turned narrow streets into death traps and caused rivers to rush through homes and businesses, making many uninhabitable. Some looted shops and authorities arrested 50 people.
Social networks channeled the needs of those affected. Some posted images of missing people in the hope of obtaining information about their whereabouts, while others launched initiatives such as Suport Mutu – or mutual support – which connects requests for help with people who offer it; and others organized collections of basic goods across the country or launched fundraisers.
Spain’s Mediterranean coast is accustomed to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this was the most powerful flash flood in recent history. Scientists have linked it to climate change, which is also behind Spain’s increasingly high temperatures and droughts and the warming of the Mediterranean.
Human-induced climate change has doubled the chance of a storm like this week’s deluge in Valencia, according to a partial analysis published Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a group of dozens of international scientists studying the role of global warming in extreme weather.
Spain has been in a drought for almost two years, making flooding worse because the dry ground was so hard it couldn’t absorb the rain.
In August 1996, a flood swept away a campsite along the Gallego River in Biescas, in killing 87 people.