More rain pounds flood-blitzed Spain as Brit among 100s feared dead & rescuers face days finding bodies strewn in mud
MORE rain is pounding flood-blitzed Spain as a Brit is one of 95 dead – with hundreds more bodies expected to be found.
Locals and authorities are beginning the cleanup after Tuesday’s rain turned streets into rivers and face days of finding corpses in thick mud.
Rainstorms that started Tuesday and continued Wednesday caused flooding across southern and eastern Spain, stretching from Malaga to Valencia.
Thick mud has covered homes and streets and residents are battling through rubbish and cars to clean.
One bridge was swept away by a catastrophic wall of water, while footage has also emerged of a lorry being toppled over.
Now the cleanup could be stymied as a number of weather warnings threaten to add even more anguish for locals with heavy rain forecast for some areas.
The Castellon coast and part of the interior has an extreme risk red warning in place today with a huge deluge forecast.
Between 40 and 70 per cent of the area could be hammered with 180mm over the five hours between 9am and 2pm today.
Castellón de la Plana, a coastal city of 170,000 people, has already been hammered by rain which left streets flooded.
Slightly north, Tarragona could see 40mm of rain until about midday today.
Areas surrounding these in Tarragona and Castellon have a yellow warning in place with between 20mm and 30mm forecast and the possibility of hail.
A yellow rain warning is also in place for southwest Spain, running from Salamanca in the centre down to Huelva and Gibraltar.
Most of those areas could see between 15mm and 40mm of rain until about lunchtime today.
Cadiz, meanwhile, has a orange warning with 30mm forecast until about lunchtime.
Cops now fear looting could break out with thieves taking advantage of the worst natural disaster in 30 years and officers trying to rescue survivors.
Officers have been sent to patrol shopping centres with looters looking for electronics like cellphones or computers, El Pais reported.
Spain’s Defence Minister, Margarita Robles, said she is “not optimistic” about how high the death toll could climb and the number of missing is unknown.
Rescue efforts are ongoing with over 1,000 soldiers deployed to the areas worst affected.
It is the worst flood-related natural disaster to hit Spain in almost 30 years with at least four children included in the death toll.
Government minister Angel Victor Torres told public broadcaster TVE that the number dead was likely to rise because “there are many missing people”.
The Foreign Office has warned holidaymakers to brace for chaos and that journeys could be affected by the flooding.
One of the dead was a 71-year-old Brit who died from a heart attack in hospital after he was rescued from the floods, a government leader said.
He was rescued in the outskirts of Alhaurin de la Torre, Malaga, and was suffering from hypothermia when he was recovered from his home.
More than 1,000 soldiers have been deployed to help with the search and rescue operation which has already made 2,500 rescues.
Brit survives floods after escaping from car
BRIT Karen Loftus and her husband survived the flooding after climbing out of her car window, Sky News reports.
The Dorset woman says she is “lucky to be alive” after being hit by the heavy rain while driving south from their home in Alicante.
Motorway traffic they were travelling on came to a standstill before they realised the bridge ahead of them had been washed away.
Within 10 minutes water started lapping at the car and people were smashing their windows to escape.
She said cars began to float down the road that had turned into a river.
Karen said: “Just after we got out of the car, another car floated on top of our car.
“It was raging, cars were floating about, people were screaming.”
The pair managed to climb out of the car’s window with the water at chest height before they were picked up by a lorry.
She said: “It was just like a disaster movie. You know when you think ‘I could die here’. It was so utterly scary.”
The region of Valencia has been hit the hardest – with 92 of the 95 tragic deaths recorded so far in the region.
The town of Paiporta has seen some of the worst damage from the flooding with 40 people having died there so far.
Six of those who were killed were in a care home that flooded, with footage showing a hallways turned into a river as residents tried to escape in wheelchairs.
‘Worst day of my life’
Ricardo Gabaldn – mayor of Utiel, a town in Valencia – told national broadcaster RTVE that people in his town were “trapped like rats”.
He said: “Yesterday was the worst day of my life”.
Letur’s mayor Sergio Marin told Spanish TV: “We couldn’t have predicted anything like this was going to happen. It’s a major catastrophe.”
Mayor of Horno de Alcedo, a town just outside Valencia, told the BBC that the entire town was “flooded in minutes”.
She said they had been “cut off” and left “isolated” after the floods.
Javier Berenguer, 63, escaped his bakery in Utiel when crushing water that rose 2.5m high threatened to overwhelm him.
He said: “I had to get out of a window as best I could because the water was already coming up to my shoulders.
“I took refuge on the first floor with the neighbours and I stayed there all night.”
One woman was filmed clinging to her dog in the floodwaters as she tried to stay afloat.
Thankfully, rescuers managed to winch her out just before she succumbed to the water.
However, for others, help was too late.
“There are bodies and bodies continuing to appear in places we hadn’t been able to access before,” The President of the Valencia region Carlos Mazon said.
Why was Spain hit by flooding?
Spain was hit by flash floods after the east of the country was hit by a meteorological phenomena known as a ‘DANA’.
A DANA, or a ‘cold drop’ is technically a system where there is an isolated depression in the atmosphere is at high levels.
In layman’s terms, more warm and moist Mediterranean air than usual was sucked high into the atmosphere after a cold system hit the country from the south.
The easterly wind then pushed all those clouds and rain into eastern Spain.
Three to four months of rain fell in some places over the space of 24 hours.
The DANA system hit southern Spain as it arrived from Morocco yesterday and is now expected to head west over southern Portugal.