Two years after the deadliest floods in the Valencia region in living memory, the same stretch of Mediterranean coast was watching helicopters pluck families off rooftops again on Monday. Storm Adam, a slow-moving cold drop of the kind Spaniards call a DANA, parked itself over the districts of La Safor and Marina Alta, between Gandia and Denia, and simply kept raining.
The figures from the weather agency AEMET are hard to grasp. Pego, in Alicante province, collected 632 millimetres in 36 hours, more than many German cities see in a year, and Oliva beach logged almost 132 millimetres in one single hour. The rivers Serpis and Girona broke their banks; in Els Poblets cars and vans ended up stacked on top of each other.
Spanish media count four dead. Army rescuers of the UME found the body of a woman aged 79 inside her flooded house in Oliva, and a man died at a campsite there. Two women had already lost their lives at the weekend, one found on the shore at Sagunto, the other carried off by floodwater close to Barcelona. Reuters, citing its own tally, put the toll at three.
Oliva also accounted for most of the more than two thousand evacuees, while crews from the army, the Civil Guard and the coastguard flew one rescue after another. In Gandia officers used a paddleboard to float a woman of 93 out of a house where the water stood one and a half metres high. In the morning the regional government had ordered some 850,000 residents in 145 municipalities to stay indoors; by the afternoon the order still covered eight towns. Around 100,000 pupils had no school.
A chef in Els Poblets told Reuters that some neighbours had now lost “everything” for the second time, after a similar flood in 2007. The danger is not over: forecasters expected the storm to shift north towards Barcelona and Girona, where more than 100 millimetres could fall in under twelve hours on already soaked ground.
