Spanish residents appeal for help, 3 days after historic floods left at least 158 dead

Volunteers and locals walk with supplies to help places affected by heavy rains that caused floods, in Paiporta, near Valencia, Spain, November 1, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Three days after historic flash floods swept through several towns in southern Valencia, in eastern Spain, the initial shock was giving way to anger, frustration and a wave of solidarity on Friday (November 1, 2024).

Many streets are still blocked by piled-up vehicles and debris, in some cases trapping residents in their homes. Some places still don’t have electricity, running water, or stable telephone connections.

Residents turned to media to appeal for help.

“This is a disaster. There are a lot of 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 have no access to anything,” a resident of Alfafar, one of the most affected towns in south Valencia, told state television station TVE. “No one even came to warn us on the first day.”

So far 158 bodies have been recovered — 155 in Valencia, two in the Castilla La Mancha region and one more in Andalusia — after Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory. Members of the security forces and soldiers are busy searching for an unknown number of missing people, many feared to still be trapped in wrecked vehicles or flooded garages.

And as authorities repeat over and over, more storms are expected. The Spanish weather agency issued alerts for strong rains in Tarragona, Catalonia, as well as part of the Balearic Islands.

Meanwhile, flood survivors and volunteers are engaged in the titanic task of clearing an omnipresent layer of dense mud.

Residents in communities like Paiporta, where at least 62 people died, and Catarroja, have been walking kilometres to Valencia to get provisions, passing neighbours from unaffected areas who are bringing carry water, essential products or shovels to help remove the mud.

Juan Ramón Adsuara, the mayor of Alfafar, one of the hardest hit towns, said the aid isn’t nearly enough for residents trapped in an “extreme situation.”

“There are people living with corpses at home. It’s very sad. We are organising ourselves, but we are running out of everything,” he told reporters. “We go with vans to Valencia, we buy and we come back, but here we are totally forgotten.”

Rushing water turned narrow streets into death traps and spawned rivers that tore through homes and businesses, leaving many uninhabitable.

Social networks have channelled the needs of those affected. Some posted images of missing people in the hope of getting information about their whereabouts, while others launched initiatives such as Suport Mutu — or Mutual Support — which connects requests for help with people who are offering it; and others organised collections of basic goods throughout all the country or launched fundraisers.

Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this was the most powerful flash flooding in recent memory. Scientists link it to climate change, which is also behind increasingly high temperatures and droughts in Spain and the heating up of the Mediterranean Sea.

Human-caused climate change has doubled the likelihood of a storm like this week’s deluge in Valencia, according to a partial analysis issued Thursday by World Weather Attribution, a group made up of dozens of international scientists who study global warming’s role in extreme weather.

Spain has suffered through an almost two-year drought, making the flooding worse because the dry ground was so hard that it could not absorb the rain.

In August 1996, a flood swept away a campsite along the Gallego river in Biescas, in the northeast, killing 87 people.