Spain flood death toll hits 205, some areas still cut off

Debris block a street after flooding devastated the town of Paiporta, in the region of Valencia, eastern Spain.

Spanish rescuers opened a temporary morgue in a convention centre and battled to reach areas still cut off yesterday as the death toll from catastrophic floods rose to 205 people in Europe’s worst weather disaster in five decades.
In Valencia, the eastern region that bore the brunt of the devastation, about 500 soldiers were deployed to hunt for people who are still missing and help survivors of the storm, which triggered a fresh weather alert in Huelva in southwestern Spain.
Officials said the death toll is likely to keep rising. It is already Spain’s worst flood-related disaster in modern history and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.
In Alfafar, a suburb outside the city of Valencia, Spain’s third-largest, drone footage showed the tangled wreckage of dozens of vehicles strewn across rail tracks.
“It’s all destroyed, shops, supermarkets, schools, cars,” said local resident Patricia Villar. Close by, a boat that had been carried by the floodwaters lay on a muddy street corner.
Emergency services working to clear cars piled up at the entrance of a flooded underpass in the suburb feared finding more trapped bodies. “We’re trying to remove vehicles bit by bit to see if there are victims,” one rescue worker told state television. “We don’t know.”
With about 75,000 homes still without electricity, firefighters were siphoning petrol from cars that had been abandoned in the floods to power generators to get domestic supplies back on. “We’re going from car to car looking for any petrol we can find,” said one firefighter who had travelled to Valencia from the southern region of Andalusia to assist rescue efforts, carrying a plastic tube and empty bottles to collect the petrol from the cars’ tanks.
A year of rain fell in just eight hours on Tuesday night, destroying roads, railway tracks and bridges as rivers burst their banks.
The flooding also submerged thousands of hectares of farmland in the region, which produces nearly two-thirds of citrus fruit in Spain – the world’s top exporter of oranges.