Pedestrians stood beside stacked cars after deadly floods in Sedavi, south of Valencia, eastern Spain, on October 30, 2024. — AFP
A disheartened Jose Manuel Rellan could only helplessly observe as incessant rains soaked his town in eastern Spain on Wednesday, marking the country's deadliest floods in decades. "It has been raining non-stop for 10 hours...And the result is what you see," the 49-year-old warehouse worker told AFP in Ribarroja del Turia, gesturing towards streets flooded with mud. "We are isolated, you can't reach parts of the town. The roads and bridges are all cut." Rellan resides in a town near the Mediterranean coastal city of Valencia, which bore the brunt of the damage with over 70 deaths announced nationwide following the torrential rains. The local Turia river was a raging torrent of swollen, brownish water that nearly overflowed a main bridge when AFP visited on Wednesday. Stranded motorists waited outside their vehicles as a massive traffic jam extended along the highway leading out of the town due to severe road disruptions.
"It had been a long time since this happened and we're frightened," said Esther Gomez, a Socialist town councillor in Ribarroja del Turia. "We went from a place where nothing was happening to a massive flood in just minutes," the 57-year-old told AFP. The inaccessibility of flooded roads and damage to communication and power infrastructure have made the rescue efforts even more challenging. "The emergency and security services were overwhelmed, as so many places were affected that they couldn't reach all the areas," Gomez recalled a chaotic night. The sudden surge of water in nearby streams flooded the town's industrial estate, leaving workers stranded overnight with no chance of rescue, she said. Similar devastation occurred in other parts of the Valencia region, including the village of L'Alcudia, which resident Eva Sanz described as "destroyed" by the floods. The river overflowed "in three or four minutes. In a very short time, the entire landscape changed completely," she told Spanish public broadcaster TVE. "The fear from last night is worse than the cleanup now... we were very scared." The storm dumped 230 mm of rain on the Valencia region town of Utiel on Tuesday—three times the previous daily record, according to national weather agency AEMET. This amount of water was almost six times greater than the average for the entire month of October.
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