Flood survivors say regional Spanish officials waited too long to warn them of the danger

BARRIO DE LA TORRE, Spain. Minutes after raging waters burst through the front door of her home, Marie Carmen Perez received a text message from regional authorities in Spain warning of the possibility of flash flooding.

When Perez’s phone rang, water had already poured into her kitchen, living room and bathroom, forcing her and her family to flee upstairs.

“They had no idea what was going on,” Perez, a 56-year-old cleaner, said Thursday by phone from Barrio de la Torre in Valencia. “Everything is destroyed. The people here, we’ve never seen anything like it.”

She was one of those lucky ones. More than 150 people were killed, many trapped in cars or on the first floors of their homes, when storm-fed rivers burst their banks and swept through dozens of towns on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia.

The huge death toll — easily making the floods Spain’s worst natural disaster in living memory — has raised questions about how it could have happened in a European Union country that prioritizes public safety.

As rescuers continued to pull bodies from the mud and debris on Thursday, anger also began to mount among families and friends mourning the loss of loved ones and the many thousands more whose livelihoods were destroyed by the floods. The streets were filled with people going to buy essentials, their cars were damaged and the streets were impassable due to mud and debris.

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

Valencia regional president Carlos Mason, of the conservative Popular Party, defended his administration’s handling of the crisis, saying “all our leaders followed standard protocol” coordinated by Spain’s central government.

Spain’s interior ministry said in a statement that regional administrations are responsible for sending alerts to warn the public of possible floods and other natural disasters.

Mason is also under fire for his announcement at 1pm on Tuesday that the storm front would “lose strength” by 6pm.

The scale and ferocity of the extreme weather event was shocking and extremely difficult for any administration to prepare for and anticipate. But Valencia, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, has a history of autumn storms causing flooding, albeit of a lesser magnitude than this monster storm.

On Sunday, two days before the tragedy, Spain’s national meteorological agency warned officials and the public via its website and social media that there was a 70% chance of heavy rain.

The agency then issued a red alert, the highest level of warning, for severe weather as late as 7:30 a.m. Tuesday morning as disaster threatened.

Andreu Salom, mayor of the Valencian village of Alcudia, told national broadcaster RTVE that his town had lost at least two residents, a daughter and her elderly mother who lived together, and that police were still looking for the missing truck driver.

He complained that he and his townspeople did not warn of the disaster that occurred when the Magro River overflowed.

“I went to check the river level myself because I had no information,” Salom said. “I went with the local police, but we had to go back because the tsunami of water, mud, reeds and dirt was already entering the city.”