Torrential rains in Valencia, in eastern Spain, caused flooding that killed more than 200 people. The deluge started inland. It took the authorities hours to warn those downstream.
Hours before a river of mud descended on towns around Valencia, trapping and killing hundreds of people, water started gushing through the small Spanish municipality of Utiel.
A quiet winemaking town on the upper reaches of the Magro River, inland from Valencia, Utiel sits about an hour’s drive from the sprawling, densely populated eastern coast of Spain that was inundated last month in some of Europe’s worst flooding in decades.
Heavy rains began in Utiel on the morning of October 29. By about 1pm, the town’s narrow cobblestone streets were filled with several inches of water. By 2pm, a muddy tide nearly reached the windows of the town’s low homes as the Magro spilled over its banks. Trash cans and cars drifted about like toy boats. By 3pm, the mayor said he had alerted the firefighters and the military emergency unit.
“Everyone knew that we were drowning,” Mayor Ricardo Gabaldón said.
Yet the regional authorities failed to alert towns and villages a few dozen miles lower down the Magro that the river was raging and coming their way, mayors said. Hours later, it hit those places, too.
“I don’t know why they didn’t warn us,” said José Javier Sanchis Bretones, the mayor of Algemesí, which was flooded in the evening, killing at least three people there.
The exact reasons for the delay are unclear. Some officials suggest the severity of the downpour and the potential ramifications were difficult to foresee. But among residents, anger is high as they ask whether such a calamity had to be so deadly and why they were not alerted in time.
More than two weeks later, residents are still clearing mud that covered anything below eye level in several towns around Valencia. They are mourning the at least 221 people who died in the flooding. Seven are still missing. Many streets remain impassable, clogged with debris. Thousands of businesses and homeowners have lost everything.
The flooding was no doubt the kind of extraordinary weather event that climate change is making both less extraordinary and more unpredictable. Yet the disaster exposed glaring delays by authorities in alerting the population.
Weather and river-monitoring agencies issued repeated warnings starting early in the day to regional authorities about torrential rains and dangerously high water levels in usually empty or low rivers and ravines.
While those warnings did not anticipate the full extent of the threat, the downpour’s disastrous scope quickly became clear. By midday, an official with the national weather agency said on Spanish television that in one area, the rains amounted to five gallons of water per square foot.
The torrent presented a danger to people living downstream, the official warned, because floods could inundate them even though it was not raining in their area, creating a false sense of security.
Still, Valencia regional authorities, who are in charge of managing such emergencies, say they did not have enough information to realise the magnitude of the threat.
“If we did not have the information, we could not act,” said Salomé Pradas, the regional official in charge of managing emergencies.
Yet Pradas acknowledged that she was made aware of the existence of an emergency text-messaging system to alert the population only at 8pm that day, even though the regional Government had put the system in place in 2023. The President of the Valencia region dismissed Pradas this past week.
Only at 8.11pm did a general alert go out urging people to find shelter. By then, many residents were up to their chins in water.
“When the alert came, my grandpa had already drowned,” said Carlos Cervera, 37, a resident of the town of Paiporta, close to the coast, where more than 50 people died.
‘Already looking bad’
A lawyer, Gabaldon, the mayor of Utiel, woke up at 6am that Tuesday in October and saw violent rain pounding his window. He consulted with the mayors of neighbouring towns, and quickly ordered local schools to be closed.
Ten minutes later, the national weather agency issued a red alert, the highest warning, to regional authorities about heavy rains in the Valencia area. But in Utiel, Gabaldon said, “Things were already looking bad”.
They kept getting worse. While the water level of the Magro often rises near Utiel, this time the river was on the brink of breaching its banks. And the rain kept pouring down.
At midday, Valencian regional authorities, responding to the alerts, posted a warning on social media to the affected towns that people should “avoid access to rivers” because of increasing flows and to monitor the situation.
By then, Gabaldon was facing the threat of water flooding homes.
Soon after, it did.
At 1pm, Rosalía Arenas, a resident of Utiel, saw a few inches of water cover her street and started taking videos with her phone. By 1.49pm, her road was submerged. Half an hour later, several feet of water nearly reached the window of the house she shared with her toddler.
About 2pm, Gabaldón alerted national and regional authorities and asked for emergency services to be deployed. He did not alert other mayors downstream, he said, because regional and national authorities already knew that his town was underwater.
“What do I do? Do I not help my neighbours? Do I let them die and start looking for the other mayors’ phone number, who I don’t even know who they are?” the mayor said.
“I already had enough to do taking care of my citizens,” he added.
Despite his efforts, rescuers could not save everyone in his town.
A few yards from Arenas, a wave of water reached the window of a neighbour, Ángel Miota, 83, a retired truck driver. He had lived for more than 57 years in a two-storey house with a pergola on Río Magro Ave.
The surge came so fast that Miota and his wife, María Sanz Gómez, 83, could not make it to the outdoor staircase that led up to where their daughter, Fernanda Miota Sanz, lived.
Instead, Miota Sanz explained, she tried to pull her parents up through a skylight, but her mother, who had recently undergone hip surgery, had trouble moving.
Her parents, who had known each other since they were 8, held on to each other for hours as water filled the room. By 5.50pm, her mother died of hypothermia in her father’s arms.
“Leave me here, leave me,” her father cried, she recalled. She finally managed to extract him through a bathroom window. He came out with broken ribs and a wounded leg.
As bad as things were in Utiel, the heavy rains inland from the coast were not limited to the Magro.
The extraordinary downpours also fell around the source of another watercourse, the Rambla del Poyo, an arroyo or gorge that originates inland and passes the suburbs of Valencia.
But in the towns lower down, the sky was clear. Life was going on mostly as usual.
“People are going to die”
In commuter towns just outside Valencia, like Paiporta, construction workers were labouring on buildings by the riverbed, which was empty. A few residents were returning from the hairdresser. Older people were sitting in their traditional ground-floor apartments, which have internal courtyards, decorated with arches, columns and colourful tiles.
Paiporta is downstream on the Rambla del Poyo. The water level had risen before, and nothing made anyone think that this time would be exceptional, the mayor, María Isabel Albalat, said. It had not even rained there that day.
She was alerted to the threat, she said, only about 6pm, after a town employee drove past the channel in Paiporta and told her that the water was running high.
She returned to her home on the central street of San Roque by 6.30pm, she recalled. The floods had arrived. Quickly, the ground floor of her home was filled with nearly2 metres of water.
She picked up the phone, she said, and called Pilar Bernabé, the Spanish Government’s representative in Valencia.
“My town is flooding, and many people are going to die,” Albalat said she told her.
It was just after 7pm, and Bernabe was in an emergency committee meeting with regional and local authorities.
About the same time, Juan Mandingorra, 93, a resident of Paiporta, called his son to say that water was gushing inside his house. His son tried to go to him, but the water was too high, another relative said. Cars were floating in the streets, residents recalled, some with people screaming inside.
Around 7.30pm, Mandingorra drowned in his living room, said Cervera, his grandson.
Still, the emergency committee continued its meeting for nearly another hour, discussing issues concerning the region’s rivers and dams, said a Spanish government official who requested anonymity to speak about the gathering.
Finally, at 8.11pm, the committee issued a general alert. Everyone’s phone rang. “Any type of movement in the province of Valencia should be avoided,” the alert said.
By that time, Concesión Tarazona Motes, 74, was holding on to a column in her apartment in Paiporta, her son said. There was little more than a foot of air between the waterline and her ceiling.
When she got the alert, Albalat, the mayor, was trying to save her neighbours from the raging waters.
“I found some alive and some dead,” she said. Five people died on her street alone, including a baby and her mother, Albalat noted. “I don’t know why they did not warn us,” she added, referring to the authorities.
The blame game
It remains unclear why it took the regional Government in Valencia until 5pm to convene an emergency coordination meeting, and why it took it another three hours for it to send out a mass alert.
The regional Government in Valencia has blamed the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation, the body in charge of monitoring the area’s water basins. The confederation is controlled by the Spanish national Government.
Pradas, the regional emergency management official, said on Spanish television that she learned the Magro had flooded only when the Mayor of Utiel told her around 2pm. She said that the Júcar confederation had not warned of the “worrisome volumes of water” before then.
Regional authorities also said that they did not learn that the Rambla del Poyo was threatening to overflow until it was breaching its banks.
The national Government has disputed this. Records it shared with The New York Times showed that the Júcar confederation and other monitoring bodies continued to send messages to authorities about heavy rains and higher-than-usual watercourse levels, including in the Magro and the Rambla del Poyo, repeatedly throughout the day.
A spokesperson for Spain’s Environment Ministry, which oversees the confederation, said that, given the information available, the regional government should have summoned the emergency committee by midday, instead of waiting until 5pm.
Even after the committee convened, Carlos Mazón, president of the Valencia region, arrived more than two hours late, according to the Spanish government official who had knowledge of the meeting.
The regional government did not respond to a request for comment about Mazón’s absence.
Mud and wounds
In the towns destroyed by the flooding, few were willing to accept that there was nothing their politicians could have done to warn them.
“It was impossible to stop the water,” said Andreu Salom, the mayor of L’Alcúdia, a town on the Magro where at least two people died. “But warning and alerting would have saved lives,” he added. “I have no doubt about that.”
Since the flooding, tens of thousands have protested in Valencia, some demanding the resignation of Mazón. But residents have mostly devoted efforts to cleaning up after the devastation and to mourning the dead.
Days after the flooding, people placed plastic bottles, cut in half and holding red or white roses, on the windowsills of the homes where residents had drowned.
Where a child had died, mourners laid candles and toys. Some spray-painted “DEP” – Spanish for “RIP” – on broken shutters they left outside victims’ homes.
For weeks, parts of the affected towns had no electricity. Cars were left overturned, smashed and piled up on the streets. Residents moved on foot, walking the muddy streets at night with head lamps and face masks, some in hazmat suits, fearing disease.
Many had lost everything.
Possessions that could be extracted from homes were piled in the streets, forming an obstacle course of overturned tables, grand pianos, highchairs, sofas, refrigerators and washing machines.
Many remained in shock.
Miota Sanz, who spent hours trying to pull her parents to safety in Utiel, said she could not stop thinking of her father as he told her, “Don’t fool us, don’t fool us, they are not coming,” when, indeed, no rescuers were on the way.
“I will never forget it in my life,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Emma Bubola
Photographs by: Emma Bubola
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES