Valencia flash flooding

[MotherOfGodWeeFella]

The news and pictures/videos are apocalyptic. I spent a few days in Valencia last month with good friends. My friends who live there are all okay, although the brother of one spent the night on the roof of a business next to the A road they'd been driving on after abandoning their car which was then swept away by the flood waters. Another can't get to work as the bridge that links their town to the business park they work at is unsafe. A bridge we drove over just a few weeks ago.

The gota fria is a weather phenomenon I remember from living there - we had 48 hours of torrential rain then and there was some minor flooding, but this has been horrendous. So many have lost their lives, infrastructure is badly damaged, 120,000 with no shelter tonight.

I saw the news that an older British couple have sadly been found dead as victims of the flooding and instantly thought of this thread and @KickHimInTheCrotch - I hope that you have had news from your father and that it is not him, and desperately sorry for their family.

I live in Spain but the other side, and it feels so distanced and surreal from here. Of course it is all everybody is talking about, but it does not feel real. The videos on tiktok are horrific. And awful that politicians are blaming victims for doing stuff like going to move their cars from garages when there was no proper warning.

But there was plenty of warning.

My brother lives in Spain and sent me a tweet from the Spanish weather agency warning that the rain levels would be beyond anything seen before - in an area with regular flash flooding where people are used to seasonal torrential rain.

I in the UK knew about it hours before the rain started.

Whether people took it seriously (because in the past maybe the weather forecast in red alerts hasn't materialised) is another matter.

@BecauseRonald it seems to have been accepted that the warnings in Valencia were too late or didn't indicate the level of threat sufficiently so your post contradicts that. Whereabouts does your brother live?

Generic warnings were out there - up the road the French met office were warning a day or so ahead of possible problems for that part of Spain due to unusally heavy rainfall....they were watching it because the weather system that caused the Valencia flooding had already dumped a very significant amount of rain on parts of the French med coast.

What seems ro have fallen down is the short term/local warnings.

Sorry - duplicate post

Portentous but still Trump and his kind deny climate change and how human activity has contributed and hastened it.
I fear that the world will become accustomed to more and more of these “rare” events.

Link to instagram video which for me really shows the chronology regarding when the warning came vs. the reality at that time. People were receiving the warning alerts on their phones as they rode their cars down the roads like a rapid ride at a theme park.

There were AEMET warnings (equivalent to Met.Office warnings) but these only get through to people who check that sort of thing. For example, schools were open (apart from some with savvy heads who thought about families getting in and out from surrounding villages).

I live in the Basque Country and we constantly have yellow warnings and orange ones, they have become like background noise. I cannot blame people for not heeding them, this was unlike anything Spain has ever seen.

That video of the water coming down the street is terrible.

I've been thinking of that since this happened. It seems like the best way to alert people via their phones

BrightGreenLeaves · Yesterday 19:45
How would they have warned people? Do they have that emergency text thing that we had trialled her a few years ago?

Yes but warnings weren’t sent until houses were already flooded and cars swept away.

Just so bad that the warning weren’t sent in time. The videos show just how quickly the water came down the street.

Okay, so I've been able to do some fact checking: a red weather warning was issued by the Spanish meteorigical agency that morning. The alert issued to mobile phones at 8pm came from the civil protection service. It therefore looks as though people ignored the weather warning as the weather didn't deteriorate until the evening or the weather warning wasn't precise enough in terms of when the DANA would hit. The civil protection service warning came when it was already raining/flooding had started and it was too late for people to get home or get themselves out of harm's way.

I mean the Met office give so many yellow or red weather warnings. It’s easy to assume it’ll be the same as all the other times there’s been a red warning. Which is nothing like on the scale of what happened in Spain.

I'd expect a warning to be quite specific not just a red warning, or heavy rain

But get out of basements, and stay inside, that kind of specific nature by phone

One of my friends has been volunteering today, taking water, blankets, gloves and masks to the ground zero area. He said he saw no soldiers, a few policemen, mainly volunteers helping others and a lot of misery.

@EasternStandard - the DANA is not a new phenomenon by any stretch and heavy rainfall will be known to have flooded basements, underground car parks, etc. This was worse than experienced before and happened very quickly. I'm going to hazard a guess that extreme weather warnings are becoming more frequent. That what is predicted doesn't always come to pass and, as a result, they become too routine.

Thankfully my dad got in touch eventually. He is staying in Marbella (which I didn't know) and he says he seems to have missed the worst of it. I had a worrying couple of days checking the news. So desperately sad for those caught up in it and their families, feeling very lucky myself now.

That’s such a relief. The protests look big.