The wreckage of a car swept away and pulverized in flash flooding found by Spanish Military Emergency Unit personnel searching for victims in the flood-hit municipality of Letur in Albacete province, about 160 miles southeast of Madrid. Photo by Ismael Herrero/EPA-EFE
Spain was preparing for more heavy rainfall Friday two days after devastating flash floods killed more than 200 in the east of the country, destroyed homes and businesses and put key infrastructure out of action.
The State Meteorological Agency issued an urgent red warning for heavy rain for the coastal zone of Huelva province on the Gulf of Cadiz, 15 miles east of the Portuguese border, starting at 9 a.m. local time through midnight Friday. Advertisement
“Updated adverse weather events notification in Andalusia. Active TODAY. Maximum level red. Image of the warning map in effect at 09:06,” AEMET wrote in an alert posted on X accompanied by a map of the worst affected areas showing more than an inch-and-half of rain per hour and accumulations of 5.5 inches of rain forecast for the coming hours.
Inland from the coastal zone, two adjacent districts of Huelva province, Andevalo y Condado and Aracena, were under an orange warning, the second highest alert level, with AEMET forecasting more than an inch of rain per hour and accumulations of 4.3 inches. Advertisement
People in the region were urged to remain at home and not to travel except in emergencies with the warning echoed by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez who appealed to people to heed AEMET’s advice.
“DANA [the high-altitude isolated depression blamed for the extreme weather] has not ended, there are provinces with orange and red warnings,” he said in a post on X after visiting AEMET’s operations center in Madrid on Friday.
“Let us take extreme precautions and always be attentive to the information given to us by the authorities.”
The warnings came as the death toll from flooding overnight Tuesday and Wednesday reached 205.
Orange alerts were also in force for areas north of the worst of the flooding earlier in the week that ravaged eastern Spain’s Valencia region with two municipalities of Castellon province and two districts in and around Tarragona in Catalonia under orange warnings with up to 1.5 inches of rain per hour and accumulations of as much as 4 inches forecast.
The warnings for Castellon and Tarragona were the second straight day of jeopardy for the two regions after they saw some of the heaviest rain across the country on Thursday. Advertisement
AEMET also issued orange warnings for several areas of the two largest Balearic islands of Mallorca and Menorca in the Mediterranean Sea, forecasting as much as 2 inches of rain per hour and accumulations of 4.7 inches.
Meanwhile, Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles on Friday ordered an additional 500 troops to assist in the rescue and clean-up operation in Valencia, bringing the total number of military personnel deployed in the wake of the country’s worst natural disaster in decades to more than 1,700.
The BBC reported that Robles told Spain’s RTVE television news she would commit “as many as necessary” to help in areas where they were needed.
“Everything that can be done is being done and will continue to be done,” she told the state-run broadcaster.
That came after an earlier pledge from Sanchez on a visit to Valencia on Thursday to pay his respects that the central government would make available “all possible resources and means, for reconstruction and the return to normality.”
On the ground in Valencia, where the death toll topped 202 on Friday, the regional government announced a $270 million disaster recovery fund.
Rescue teams are continuing to search buildings and outdoors for an unknown number of people still missing with Transport Minister Oscar Puente warning there were bodies inside some of the thousands of vehicles swept away in flash floods. Advertisement
Nine bodies were found in a garage, including a local police officer, in the south Valencia suburb of La Torre.
Some people in the worst affected areas complained of having no clean running water, access to proper food, electricity, Internet or mobile phone communication and that they had received no help from local or national government agencies.
Transport links remain patchy after widespread, extensive damage to bridges and key national road and rail lines with at least 40,000 homes in the Valencia region still without power.
