How Spain suffered from deadly floods

Paiporta:

Water was already knee-deep on the first floor of the hotel where Aitana Puhal took the refugee when she received a text alert from the Valencia regional government at 8pm on October 29 warning people to take shelter in place against severe flash flooding.

“We could have ended (the warning) about six hours earlier,” said the 23-year-old, who fled with other locals and guests to the first floor of a hotel near the town of Paiport. “We all calmed down a bit from the panic and wiped our feet.”

Others were not so lucky.

Carlos Martinez, another Paiporta resident, told local television that the flood warning came when he was stuck in a tree “after seeing bodies floating by”.

Dozens of residents of flooded settlements told Reuters that by the time they received a warning from the regional government, muddy water was already surrounding their cars, flooding the streets of their towns and pouring into their homes.

After days of storm warnings from the National Weather Service since Oct. 25, some municipalities and local agencies raised the alarm much earlier. The University of Valencia told its employees not to come to work the day before. Several town halls in eastern Spain have suspended operations, closed public facilities and ordered people to stay at home.

But the mixed messages and confusion cost lives, dozens of local residents and experts told Reuters. More than 220 people have died and nearly 80 are still missing in the deadliest flooding in a European country since 1967, when floods in Portugal killed around 500 people.

The National Meteorological Service AEMET raised the threat of torrential rain to a red alert at 7:36 a.m. on October 29 after heavy rain in mountainous areas west of the city of Valencia since early morning. In the 12 hours it took for the regional government’s shelter-in-place order to come in, waters flowing through the normally dry Poyo ravine – the epicenter of the flooding – rose to more than three times the height of Spain’s largest river.

As climate change worsens weather conditions along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, flooding is becoming more common, and some previous incidents have been fatal. But after at least five decades without a major disaster, many people in Valencia were unaware of the serious danger flash floods pose or how to respond to them.

Puhal, 23, who sought shelter in a hotel, said she had never been given much information about flood risks.

“There were talks at school about fires,” she said. “But not the floods.”

That, combined with poor coordination between regional and national authorities, as well as political decisions made years ago not to invest in waterway infrastructure, exacerbated the catastrophic loss of life, said seven experts consulted by Reuters.

“It was predictable that there would be a catastrophic flood here,” said Félix Frances, a professor of hydraulic engineering and the environment at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

According to Reuters, reports from the environment ministry recorded deaths in 14 of the 24 cities already identified as being at high risk of flooding.

Experts, including hydraulic and civil engineers, geologists, urban planners and disaster management specialists, said the successive failures to mitigate flooding on nearby rivers, better protect homes built on floodplains, educate people and quickly warn the residents – added to the fatal cases.

With better infrastructure, “these deaths would be much less,” said Luis Banon, an engineer and professor of transportation engineering and infrastructure at the University of Alicante.

One central government source said they expected multiple judicial inquiries to examine the decisions made and determine responsibility for the high death toll.

As more of the world’s population settles on floodplains, climate events become more extreme and Europe heats up faster than the global average, what happened in Valencia highlights the need for strategic, coordinated action to protect people in European cities, said Sergio Palencia , professor of urbanization at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Francis said that 17 years ago he was involved in the development of the plan to build flood protection works for the Poyo Gorge, which at the time cost 150 million euros ($162 million). On November 5, a week after the flood, the national government allocated 10.6 billion euros to help the victims.

The plan Francis was working on expired in 2017 because “no work had been started,” Spain’s environment secretary, Hugo Moran, told Reuters. According to him, the government had to start from scratch, and some work is underway.

Francis said some people were so unaware of the risks that they didn’t know, for example, that it would be unwise to go down into the basement “to save the car.”

A few notifications

On October 25, AEMET had already warned of a storm known locally as DANA, a high-altitude isolated depression. In the following days, its warnings became more specific until October 29, when the warning was upgraded to red, the highest level, meaning high risks to the public.

At 8:45 a.m., AEMET’s regional office posted footage on social media platform X showing cars being washed away by torrents of brown water.

Just after midday, the state body that manages the region’s river basins, the Jucar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), sent an email to the regional authorities, saying the flow of water through the Poyo Gorge had reached 264 cubic meters per second. This is stronger than the average flow of the Guadalquivir River, one of the largest in Spain.

CHJ said it can only release information to regional emergency services, which are responsible for notifying citizens. Three experts told Reuters that once the water starts to rise, it will take less than nine hours to reach the cities.

For the next eight hours, representatives of regional and national governments, environmental agencies and emergency services exchanged phone calls, emails and held emergency meetings.

For some time that day, the CHJ data indicated that the flow was decreasing.

Carlos Mazon, the president of the region and the main person responsible for the shelter-in-place warning, has become the focus of anger over the authorities’ response to the storm. Despite signs of heavy flooding, he did not change his schedule.

At a lunchtime news conference, he cited a national weather forecast that said the storm would weaken around 6 p.m., according to a tweet he later deleted.

Earlier in the day, Mason, a member of the conservative People’s Party, which is in opposition to the Socialist-led National Government, appeared in photos posted on Twitter by his staff who received a sustainable tourism certificate and discussed budget issues.

His office did not respond to requests for comment on his handling of the disaster. Mason told reporters Thursday that he had a “working lunch” on Oct. 29 and was in constant contact with his team as they resolved the situation.

According to the statement, at 5:00 p.m., when the authorities reconvened, the CHJ gave a “verbal message” about a general increase in water flows flowing through or near the towns, according to the statement.

At 6:43 p.m., CHJ sent another email warning that the flow of water through the gorge had reached 1,686 cubic meters per second, three times the speed of the Ebro, Spain’s largest river.

Twelve minutes later, CHJ reported that the Poyot flow had increased to 2,282 cubic meters per second before destroying the sensor that was measuring it.

“It could fill an Olympic swimming pool every second,” said Nahum Mendes, a geologist at the University of Valencia.

As of 7 p.m., many towns were without power, making it difficult to send instant alerts to phones or radio stations, officials said.

María Isabel Albalat, the mayor of Paiporta, which lies on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, said she called the national government representative in the region to tell her that “my city is flooding” and “people are already dying.” Police drove through the city with sirens, lights and loudspeakers, urging people to stay off the bridge and off the streets.

At 8 p.m., Spanish Environment Minister Moran, who was traveling to Colombia, called regional emergency official Salome Pradas to say there was a risk of the dam failing.

Pradas told local television on Thursday that a technical consultant suggested the services send a text alert.

“How is it possible that with all the information available … the authorities responsible for activating the alarm did nothing?” Moran said.

Mason, the regional chairman, later said CHJ’s data showing reduced water flows added to the confusion and delays. Moran, whose department oversees CHJ, told Reuters his role was only to provide real-time information to emergency response teams, not to make decisions about their response.

The mayor of Paiporta, Albalat, said that at the time of the warning, “we were up to our necks in water for more than an hour and a half.”

Flood protection

Political decisions not to invest earlier in better flood defenses to protect a wider area increased the economic costs “200-fold”, said Benon, the Alicante-based professor.

“Such works are not sexual, they do not give political profitability until something happens,” he said.

“Now they have no choice but to get to work.”

In other countries, such as the United States and Japan, natural disasters are more common, so people have a better understanding of how to respond, said Maria Jesus Romero, 50, a professor of urban planning law at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

Some residents of Valencia recalled past floods, including a large one in 1957. After that, the city of Valencia was protected by hydraulic works completed under the dictator General Francisco Franco in 1973.

Paiporta residents Rosario Macia, 84, and her husband Cristobal Martinez, 87, said the past floods were “nothing” compared to the current ones.

“It was difficult for us, but not like now,” said Masya. “We’re broke.”

Many of the properties affected by the floods were built before 2003, when revised guidelines for building in flood zones were issued, experts said. The new guidelines either prohibit construction or contain strict prerequisites, including that properties built in flood zones must not have basements.

In the predominantly working-class suburb of Valencia, a car is vital to get to work. Many of those interviewed by Reuters in the flood zone said their first step when it rains is to move their cars from the underground parking lots of their apartment buildings so their engines are not damaged by the flood.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from the syndicated feed.)