The ground floor of the hotel where Aitana Puchal took refuge was already knee-deep in water when she received a text alert from the regional government of Valencia at 8 pm on 29 October, telling people to evacuate due to severe flooding. A warning was given.
“We could have (warned) about six hours earlier,” said the 23-year-old man, who fled with other local residents and guests to the first floor of the hotel near the town of Paporata. “We were all nervously calming down a bit and drying our feet.”
Others were not so lucky.
Carlos Martínez, another resident of Pieporta, told local television that the flood warning came when he was stuck on a tree and saw “bodies floating.”
Dozens of residents of flooded communities told Reuters that by the time they received warnings from the regional government, dirty water had engulfed their cars, submerged roads in their towns and entered their homes.
After several days of storm warnings from the National Weather Service beginning October 25, some municipalities and local institutions sounded the alarm much earlier. Valencia University had asked its staff not to come to work a day earlier. Many town halls in the region of eastern Spain had suspended activities, closed public facilities and told people to stay at home.
But dozens of local residents and experts told Reuters that mixed messages and confusion resulted in loss of lives. More than 220 people died and about 80 are still missing in the deadliest flooding in a European country since 1967, when floods in Portugal killed nearly 500 people.
After heavy rain since morning in mountainous areas west of the city of Valencia, the national weather service AEMET raised the danger level for heavy rain to red alert at 7.36 am on 29 October. In the 12 hours it took for the regional government’s shelter-in-place order to be implemented, the water flowing through the usually dry Poyo ravine – the epicenter of the flood – had increased to more than three times the flow of Spain’s largest river.
As climate change worsens weather patterns along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, floods are becoming more common and some past incidents have been deadly. But after at least five decades without any major disaster, many people in Valencia were unaware of the serious dangers posed by flash flooding or how to respond.
Puchal, 23, who took shelter in the hotel, said she never received much information about the dangers of floods.
“At school, they talked about the fire,” she said. “But not flooding.”
Seven experts consulted by Reuters said that, due to poor coordination between regional and national authorities, as well as political decisions taken years ago not to invest in waterways infrastructure, led to the catastrophic loss of life.
“It was predictable that we would have catastrophic floods,” said Felix Francis, professor of hydraulic engineering and environment at Valencia Polytechnic University.
A Reuters review found that deaths had already been recorded in 14 of the 24 cities reported by the environment ministry as being at high risk of flooding.
Experts, including hydraulic and civil engineers, geologists, urban planners and disaster relief experts, said there were persistent failures – to carry out flood mitigation work on nearby rivers, to better protect homes built on flood plains, to educate people and educate residents. In not giving immediate warning – the deaths added up.
With better infrastructure, “those deaths would have been extremely low,” said Luis Bannon, an engineer and professor of transportation engineering and infrastructure at the University of Alicante.
A central government source said they expected multiple judicial inquiries to be conducted to examine the decisions taken and fix responsibility for the high death toll.
As more of the world’s population settles on flood plains, climate events become more extreme and Europe warms faster than the global average, what happened in Valencia shows the need for strategic, coordinated action to protect people in European cities. Underlines the need for measures, said Professor Sergio Palencia. Urbanism at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Francis said he helped draw up plans to build flood works for the Poyo ravine 17 years ago at a cost of 150 million euros ($162 million). On 5 November, a week after the floods, the national government earmarked 10.6 billion euros to help victims.
Hugo Moran, Spain’s secretary of state for the environment, told Reuters the plan Francis worked on expired in 2017 because “no work was started”. The government will have to start from scratch and some work is underway, he said.
Francis said that some people were so unaware of the risks that they did not know, for example, that it would be unwise to go into the basement “to save the car.”
multiple alerts
AEMET had already warned of a typhoon known locally as DANA – a high-altitude isolated depression – on October 25. In the following days, its warnings became more specific until October 29, when the alert was upgraded to red – the highest level, meaning high risk to the population.
At 8.45am, AEMET’s regional branch posted footage on social media platform X showing cars floating on roads in a tide of brown water.
Just after noon, the Jucar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), the public body that manages the region’s river basins, emailed regional authorities to say that water flow through the Poyo ravine had reached 264 cubic meters per second. This is stronger than the average flow of the Guadalquivir River, one of Spain’s largest rivers.
The CHJ said it could only provide information to regional emergency services, which are responsible for issuing alerts to citizens. Three experts told Reuters that once the waters started rising, it would take less than nine hours to reach cities.
Over the next eight hours, officials from regional and national governments, environmental authorities and emergency services exchanged phone calls, emails and held emergency meetings.
For some time that afternoon, CHJ data showed that flows were declining.
Carlos Mazzone, the territory’s president and the main person responsible for issuing shelter-in-place alerts, has become the focus of anger over authorities’ response to the storm. Despite signs of severe flooding, he did not change his schedule.
At a lunchtime news conference, he cited the national weather forecast and said the storm’s intensity would reduce around 6 p.m., according to a tweet he later deleted.
As the day wore on, Mazzone, a member of the conservative People’s Party, which sits in opposition to the Socialist-run National government, appeared in photos tweeted by his staff receiving a sustainable tourism certification and discussing budgetary matters. Appeared.
His office did not respond to requests for comment on his handling of the disaster. Mazzone told reporters Thursday that he had a “work lunch” on Oct. 29 and was in constant contact with his team handling the situation.
According to a statement, at 5 p.m., as officials reconvened, the CHJ gave “verbal notification” of a generalized increase in water flows flowing through or near the towns.
At 6.43pm, CHJ sent another email warning that the flow of water through the ravine had reached 1,686 cubic meters per second – more than three times the speed of the Ebro, Spain’s largest river.
Twelve minutes later, CHJ said the Poyo flow had increased to 2,282 cubic meters per second before destroying the sensor measuring it.
“It could fill an Olympic pool every second,” said geologist Nahum Méndez of the University of Valencia.
As of 7 p.m., many towns were without power, making it difficult to send immediate alerts over the phone or to radio stations, officials said.
María Isabel Albalat, mayor of Paporata, on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, said she called the national government representative in the region to tell him that “my city is flooding” and that “people are already dying.” Police went through the city with sirens, lights and loudspeakers asking people to stay off the bridge and off the streets.
At 8 p.m., Spain’s environment secretary Moran, who was traveling in Colombia, called Salomé Pradas, the regional official in charge of emergency services, saying the dam was in danger of failing.
Pradas told local television on Thursday that a technical advisor suggested sending a text alert to the services.
“How is it possible that despite all the information available…the agencies responsible for activating the alarm did nothing?” Moran said.
Regional chief Mazon later said that CHJ data showed a decline in water flows, adding to the confusion and delays. Moran, whose department oversees the CHJ, told Reuters its job was only to provide real-time information to emergency teams, not to make decisions on their response.
Albalat, mayor of Paporta, said that by the time the alert came, “we were neck-deep in water for more than an hour and a half.”
flood protection
Political decisions not to invest earlier in better flood protection to protect the wider region have increased the economic cost “by as much as 200 per cent”, said Bannon, the professor at the University of Alicante.
“This kind of work is not sexy, it doesn’t give political mileage unless something happens,” he said.
“Now they have no choice but to work.”
In other countries, such as the United States and Japan, natural disasters are more common so people have a better sense of how to respond, said María Jesus Romero, 50, a professor of urban planning law at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
Some residents of Valencia remembered previous floods, including the great flood of 1957. After that, the city of Valencia was protected by hydraulic works completed in 1973 under dictator General Francisco Franco.
Paporata residents Rosario Masia, 84, and her husband Cristóbal Martínez, 87, said the previous flood was “nothing” compared to this one.
“We had tough times, but not like now,” Masia said. “We’re in pieces.”
Experts said many of the properties affected by the floods were built before 2003, when revised guidance on construction in flood areas was issued. The new guidance either bans construction or includes strict pre-requirements including that properties built in flood zones should not have basements.
In Valencia’s largely working-class suburbs, the car is vital for getting to work. Many of the people interviewed by Reuters in the flood area said their first step when it rains is to get their cars out of their apartment blocks’ underground car parks so that the engines are not damaged by the floods.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
