ALFAFAR, Spain—Spanish rescuers opened a temporary morgue at a convention center and struggled to reach still-isolated areas Friday as the death toll from catastrophic flooding rose to 205 people in Europe’s worst climate disaster in five decades.
In Valencia, the eastern region that suffered the brunt of the devastation, some 500 soldiers were deployed to search for people still missing and help survivors of the storm, prompting a new weather alert in Huelva in the southwest. from Spain.
Officials said the death toll is likely to continue rising. It is already the worst flood-related disaster in Spain in modern history and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.
In Alfafar, a suburb on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, Spain’s third-largest city, drone footage showed the tangled remains of dozens of vehicles strewn across train tracks.
“Everything is destroyed, shops, supermarkets, schools, cars,” said local resident Patricia Villar. Nearby, a washed-up boat lay in a muddy corner.
Emergency services working to remove cars piled up at the entrance to a flooded underpass in the suburb feared they would find more trapped bodies.
“We are trying to remove the vehicles little by little to see if there are victims,” a rescue worker told state television. “We don’t know.”
With around 75,000 homes still without power, firefighters were diverting gasoline from cars that had been abandoned in the floods to power generators to restore domestic supplies.
“We go from car to car looking for gasoline that we can find,” said a firefighter who had traveled to Valencia from the southern region of Andalusia to help in the rescue efforts, carrying a plastic tube and empty bottles to collect gasoline from the tanks. cars.
a year of rain
A year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours on Tuesday night, destroying roads, railways and bridges as rivers burst their banks.
The flood also submerged thousands of hectares of agricultural land in the region, which produces almost two-thirds of the citrus fruits in Spain, the world’s top orange exporter.
“The magnitude of the catastrophe is unprecedented,” Transport Minister Oscar Puente told local television.
While the waters have receded in most parts of Valencia, emergency services have still not been able to reach some areas due to blocked roads. Among them was Albal, a neighborhood near Alfafar, one resident said.
Supplies of bottled drinking water were running low in some places and residents of the Valencian suburb of Paiporta were taking turns guarding stores after authorities said 50 people had been arrested for looting.
Standing on a busy street as neighbors and volunteers did what they could to clean up in Paiporta, resident Amber González, 72, said rebuilding and recovering from the floods would take time.
“No matter how much help we receive, it is not enough,” he said. “This won’t be fixed in a month or two.”
As the death toll rose, a temporary morgue was set up at the Feria Valencia convention center on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, emergency services said, and the first bodies began arriving early on Friday.
The death toll has sparked anger and grief in Spain, with some people accusing authorities of being poorly prepared and failing to warn people early enough about the dangers posed by the storm.
Héctor Bolívar, 65, of Valencia, questioned why a text message alert was only sent at 8 pm when heavy rain had started several hours earlier.
The president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, said that all protocols for disaster management were followed and that authorities began warning people as of Sunday.
The death toll from floods in Europe is the highest since 1970, when 209 people died in Romania.
