As public anger grows in Spain over the authorities’ lacklustre response to flooding that has left as many as 400 dead, dramatic footage has emerged showing how one town escaped the worst of the devastation thanks to a 2,000-year-old Roman dam.
While horrifying images have laid bare the catastrophic effects of flooding across Spain over recent days, the incredible video shows torrents of water hurtling down a hillside within metres of people’s homes in Aragon.
But incredibly, thanks to ancient Roman engineering which helped to direct the overflowing waters of the dam, the water was diverted down a hillside and away from the town of Almonacid de la Cuba.
It meant residents were protected from the apocalyptic flooding seen across Spain, with no damage or injuries reported in the town.
Tragically, the floods proved deadly elsewhere, with official figures indicating that some 2,000 people remain missing and the death toll continuing to rise as teams search for bodies in the worst-hit region of Valencia.
The official death toll stands at 211, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez told a press conference on Saturday morning, as rescue workers continue to comb seemingly abandoned homes as they search for survivors or bodies.
‘There are still dozens of people looking for their loved ones and hundreds of households mourning the loss of a relative, a friend or a neighbour,’ Sanchez said four days after floodwaters swept over Valencia.
As criticism of the local and central government response mounts, Sanchez said: ‘The situation we’re experiencing is tragic and dramatic. We’re almost certainly talking about the worst flood our continent has seen so far this century.
‘I’m aware that the response we’re mounting isn’t enough. I know that. And I know there are severe problems and shortages and that there are still collapsed services and towns buried by the mud where people are desperately looking for their relatives, and people who can’t get into their homes, and houses that have been buried or destroyed by mud. I know we have to do better and give it our all.’
Valencia’s regional president Carlos Mazón said the government’s emergency line was still receiving thousands of calls from people desperately searching for relatives and friends, days after the first warnings were put out.
Many Valencia residents have said alerts – issued at 8pm on Tuesday – came too late, with many stuck in traffic on the way back from work trapped in their vehicles or clambering onto their car roofs as waters rose.
Incredibly, a woman was rescued alive yesterday after three days inside a car beside her dead sister-in-law.
Aid workers are said to have discovered her after hearing her cries for help as they checked vehicles in the stricken town of Benetusser.
Regional Civil Protection president Martin Perez revealed the miracle survival late last night to applause from 400 volunteers in a municipal sports hall in nearby Moncada.
He looked visibly moved as he told them, wearing his mud-covered uniform after his life-saving work assisting the victims of one of Europe’s worst-ever natural disasters: ‘After three days we’ve found a person alive in a car.’
Mr Perez had to cut short his address with the mix of emotion and the applause from the volunteer workers listening to him.
The unnamed woman is understood to have been rescued from a flooded tunnel in Benetusser on the outskirts of the provincial capital in an area called Horta Sud, where most of the 211 victims of the flooding known to have died so far, occurred after torrential rain on Tuesday.
Firefighters in protective clothing were filmed up to their necks in water yesterday checking the mangled wreckage of vehicles in the tunnel three days after the killer flash floods caused by storm downpours,
Local reports said she had been trapped by other cars piled on top of hers. One said she had been forced to spend three days beside her dead sister-in-law while she waited for help to arrive.
The tunnel, which lies between the municipalities of Benetusser and Alfafar has been branded the ‘black tunnel’ by leading Spanish daily El Mundo.
Firefighters have been working with a volunteer tractor driver to pull cars out of the water before they are checked for occupants.
They are understood to be working with the theory that the drivers of vehicles further into the tunnel are likely to have been already inside it when they were stopped in their tracks by flash floods – and others in front of them were swept into the tunnel from other areas after their occupants managed to escape.
Earlier today it was confirmed Civil Guard divers are entering flooded garages in Benetusser where locals have told them there are still people trapped in what is expected to be a grim search for bodies rather than survivors.
The storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins and, in the Poyo riverbed, produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives.
In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads, railways and entered houses and businesses in villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city.
Flood defences in the region were not strong enough to handle such extreme weather while drainage systems were inadequate, locals and witnesses have said.
That is despite the coastal region being particularly at risk of flash flooding due to its hard ground and susceptibility to the DANA weather system as its called in Spain.
Unlike common storms, it can form independently of polar or subtropical jet streams, and happens when cold air blows over warm Mediterranean waters causing hotter air to rise quickly and form towering, dense, water-laden clouds.
These can remain over the same area for many hours, raising their destructive potential, often resulting in large hail storms and tornadoes, as seen this week.
The country has also suffered through an almost two-year drought, meaning that when the deluge happened, the ground was so hard that it could not absorb the rain, worsening the effect of the flash floods.
And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Centre for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.
Experts say that drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.
As well as Valencia, the floods have affected Castilla-La Mancha, the Region of Murcia and Andalusia, as well as the Balearic islands.
In Majorca, holidaymakers and locals were told to stay inside on Friday as storms battered coastal areas and submerged roads.
Dramatic footage showed motorists driving through high floodwaters and huge torrents of water hurtling through towns.
One tourist shared a video of terrifying lightning above her villa, writing on Friday night that the storm has ‘brought heavy rainfall and violent thunderstorms’.
She said the weather system had left some roads impassable and ‘parts of the island no longer accessible’ with reports of drivers being rescued from their cars in the popular coastal resort of Santa Ponca.
Meanwhile a Brit who lives part-time in Majorca told he did not leave his apartment on Friday due to ‘heavy rain and thunder all day’, adding that he could see a ‘continuous water spout’ from his patio.
The extreme conditions are expected to ease today, with emergency services saying that the worst of the storm seems to have passed, but the public warned to stay alert as heavy rains continue in many areas.
‘The great luck is that people stayed at home, otherwise we could be facing another scenario,’ one emergency services chief told local media.
Tragically, it was a very different situation in Valencia this week, where warnings came too late and many people were caught out by flash flooding.
The floods amount to the deadliest natural tragedy in living memory in Spain, and if the death toll continues to rise, could be Europe’s worst storm disaster in more than 50 years.
The Spanish government has sent thousands of troops to assist Valencian officials in what marks the biggest peacetime deployment of troops in the country’s history.
But many of those affected by the floods say they have felt abandoned by the authorities.
In Valencia’s Picanya suburb, shop-owner Emilia, 74, told Reuters on Saturday: ‘We feel abandoned, there are many people who need help. It is not only my house, is all the houses and we are throwing away furniture, we are throwing away everything.
‘When is the help going to come to have fridges and washing machines? Because we can’t even wash our clothes and we can’t even have a shower.’
Nurse Maria Jose Gilabert, 52, who also lives in Picanya, said: ‘We are devastated because there is not much light to be seen here at the moment, not because they are not coming to help, they are coming from all over Spain, but because it will be a long time before this becomes a habitable area again.’
Thousands have taken matters into their own hands, with pictures showing stoic volunteers taking to the streets to help in the mammoth clean up operation.
Carrying brooms, shovels, water and basic foods, hundreds of people have walked miles each day to deliver supplies and help clean up the worst-affected areas.
Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the most powerful flash flood event in recent memory.
Older people in Paiporta, ground zero of the tragedy, claim that Tuesday’s floods were three times as bad as those of 1957, which caused at least 81 deaths and were the worst in the history of the tourist eastern region.
That episode led to the diversion of the Turia watercourse, which meant that a large part of the city was spared of these floods.
Valencia suffered two other major DANAs in the 1980s, one in 1982, with around 30 deaths, and another one five years later, which broke rainfall records.
This week’s flash floods are also Spain’s deadliest natural tragedy in living memory, surpassing the flood that swept away a campsite along the Gallego river in Biescas, in the northeast, killing 87 people in August 1996.