Valencia braced for new floods as recovery still underway

The floodwaters came so suddenly to the suburban communities on Valencia’s edge last week that some residents were asleep or watching television. Authorities had not forwarded the weather warnings issued by the Spanish meteorological agency to residents downriver, even though just a few kilometers away, the Rambla Del Poyo, a small river that usually trickled through the bottom of a gorge, was about to burst its banks. The river had been swelled by water from storms in the hills behind the city that had dumped a year of average rainfall on eastern Spain in just one day.

Jose Luzzy helping with the clear up (Image: Dominic Hinde)

Wandering up the bed of the river, the destruction is total in some places. The local rail line has been swept away, rails twisted by the force of the rushing water hanging in the air. The riverbanks—reinforced with stone, concrete, and rock—have been ripped clean away by the floodwaters. Above the river gorge, brown marks show where the floodwaters reached the second floor of villas on the riverfront, many of which have had their ground floors torn away. Half a bathroom hangs perilously over the edge.

Cars sit mangled on the riverbed or crushed against trees. Many of the more than 200 people who died in last week’s flash floods were trapped on the road and swept away or penned into basement car parks where the water pressure stopped them from opening their doors.

“People have said it is a terrible way to die, to know that it is coming and there’s nothing you can do,” Carlos, the Valencian journalist I am with, tells me as we walk past divers stripping from their wetsuits after searching the still-flooded basements for bodies.

In addition to the loss of life, the damage to property in Valencia is unfathomable. Authorities estimate billions of euros worth of damage and much more lost to the local economy through the prolonged closure of shops and restaurants. Many local factories were hit, and what were once neighborhood bars have been stripped bare. Thousands of volunteers—many students at local universities—have turned up, marching into the floodzone each morning with brushes and spades to clear the mud from the undamaged city center.

Spain's King Felipe VI speaks with people amidst angry Spanish flood survivors in Paiporta, near Valencia (Image: AP)

I ate lunch with Bixente Munoz, who until last week sold pyrotechnics out of a local unit in Cattaroja. He had been working since 7am with friends to clear his business and salvage what he could. He pulls out his phone and shows me how the floodwater crushed the metal shutters inside. “Everything is unusable,” he tells me as we sit on a concrete wall under the shade of trees with their bases still buried in the mud.

Over the past forty years, there has been extensive construction on the floodplain for people moving to Valencia to live and work. What are locally referred to as villages like Cattaroja and Paiporta have grown steadily, and are in reality small towns home to tens of thousands of people, connected to the city by the local metro.

Aid volunteer Maria (Image: Dominic Hinde)

The Spanish army has been deployed, but as local aid workers told me, they turned up with no machinery, and most of the relief efforts are still being coordinated by volunteers and civil society.

Nobody knows how long it will take to repair the damage, and nobody knows what can be done to stop it happening again. With weather warnings for parts of Spain in place once again until Thursday morning, it is an uncertain time.

In the 1950s, Valencia diverted the local Turia river away from the city after major floods, and though the diversion held and protected the old city, the are to the southwest effectively became a reservoir with nowhere to drain.

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In Paiporta, electrician Jose Luzzy shows me around the remains of his home, a ground-floor apartment with a backyard that was submerged by the floodwater up to the ceiling. Everything will need to be replaced and repaired down to the plaster. His garden backs onto a small industrial unit, where workers smashed a hole in the roof to escape onto the roof of his outhouse. He shows me how he climbed up onto the roof himself by hanging onto a window grille, helping his neighbors over the garden wall so they could join him.

“Our front door just exploded. It was not even raining when it happened,” he says.

The suburbs across the Turia river are poorer and more exposed than the old city. Many people in these villages have lost everything they own. On streets that have not been cleaned, stacks of broken furniture, beds, and children’s toys sit waiting for trucks to take them away. Some streets remain impassable a week after the flood hit, with sewers blocked by river mud.

There is anger over how the authorities responded both before and after the torrent. Even though the Rambla de Poyo rose in the mid-afternoon with no sign of stopping, most of the population was blindsided. When the banks gave way, the water rose from nothing to almost two meters above street level in some places. People were caught in supermarkets or on their way to buy petrol, trapped where they stood.

Destroyed bridge in Valencia floods (Image: Dominic Hinde)

Spain is no stranger to autumn rainstorms, but what made the Valencia floods different was the severity and force of the rain. In the Valencian hills a year’s worth of rain fell in one day, levels of precipitation that the flood infrastructure was never designed to cope with. Meteorologists agree that the severity of the storm was increased by high sea temperatures in the Atlantic and Mediterranean due to climate change. The increased sea temperature leads to higher evaporation, creating bands of moist air that can dump unprecedented amounts of rain on coastal areas when they reach higher ground.

Scotland has already experienced similar events—record rainfalls in Argyll two years ago decimated farmland, while rainstorms in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic destroyed the main Edinburgh to Glasgow railway line and caused the fatal train derailment at Stonehaven. These were also likely made more severe by climate change. As ocean temperatures continue to warm as part of broader atmospheric heating due to greenhouse gas emissions, these storms will make themselves felt along Europe’s Atlantic coasts, worsened by sea level rise that reduces the ability of coastal zones to absorb floodwater.

Walking through the ruins of what were thriving communities just ten days ago, the mud baking in the midday sun, the Valencia floods are an uncomfortable preview of what may well become a common occurrence across Europe in the coming decades as climate change continues to worsen.

Dominic Hinde is a journalist and lecturer in sociology at the University of Glasgow, specialising in climate change