Spain’s prime minister has ordered 5,000 more troops and 5,000 police officers and civil guards to the Valencia region as residents criticise local authorities over their response to catastrophic flooding.
The death toll on Saturday rose to 211 people, with most fatalities in and around Valencia, Pedro Sánchez announced. The toll is expected to rise further.
Heavy rains that began on Monday caused floods that destroyed bridges and covered towns with mud, cutting off communities and leaving them without water, food or electricity.
Sánchez said the deployment of emergency services and the army was Spain’s largest in peacetime, in response to one of the worst floods in Europe this century.
The prime minister said he was aware “the response that is being given is not enough” and acknowledged “severe problems and shortages”.
He said there are still “desperate people searching for their relatives. People who cannot access their homes. Homes destroyed and buried by mud. I know we have to do better.”
Weather warnings remain in force in north-eastern and southern Spain through Sunday, while another was issued in the Balearic Islands for Saturday.
Around 1,700 soldiers are already working on search and rescue operations in the Valencia region, although hope of finding more survivors is dwindling.
Part of the focus is on pumping water out of underground tunnels and car parks, where it is feared people were trapped as water surged in.
Paco Polit, a journalist in Valencia, told the BBC the new troops will bring in much needed heavy machinery, bulldozers, trucks, and help to improve the speed and organisation of the rescue efforts.
Sánchez said some places are still “suffering from lack of basic resources”.
“We know that aid is taking time to reach certain locations. There are still garages and homes that are blocked and people are still trapped,” he said.
He vowed teams will work tirelessly until aid reaches everybody and people have regained normalcy, and called for national unity.
Authorities have restored electricity to more than 90% of homes, and brought back almost half of telephone lines that had gone down, he added.
The government also authorised 100 interim civil servants to help distribute financial aid.
Local authorities are facing criticism over the speed of the response and for a lack of warnings in advance of the flooding.
Amparo Andres, who has owned her shop in Valencia for 40 years, told the BBC that at one point the water in the building reached her neck and she believed she was going to die.
“At least I’m alive, but I’ve lost everything. My business, my home,” she said.
“And the government isn’t doing anything. Only the young people around are helping us.”
After returning to his home, local resident Juan Pérez said: “All my life, my memories.
“My parents lived there. And now overnight, it’s all gone.”
The civil protection agency, overseen by the regional government, issued an emergency alert to the phones of people in and around the city of Valencia after 20:00 local time (19:00 GMT) on Tuesday, by which time the flood water was swiftly rising in many areas and in some cases already wreaking havoc.
Juan González, who lives in the town of Aldaia, said the area was prone to flash flooding.
“It’s outrageous that our local government didn’t do anything about it, knowing that this was coming,” he said.
In the devastated town of Paiporta, where more than 60 deaths have so far been reported, residents have expressed their frustration that aid is coming in too slowly.
“There aren’t enough firefighters, the shovels haven’t arrived,” Paco Clemente, a 33-year-old pharmacist, told the AFP news agency as he helped clear mud from a friend’s house.
The federal government in Madrid is also facing criticism for not mobilising the army sooner than it did and for declining an offer from the French government to send 200 firefighters to help with search and rescue efforts.
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has vowed to do whatever it takes to help those affected by the disaster.
Volunteer clean-up efforts in Valencia – organised largely by young people on social media – saw columns of hundreds of people march to the areas most affected by the flooding.
On Friday, the local authorities said traffic would be limited in the Valencia metropolitan area between 00:00 local time on Saturday and 23:59 on Sunday.
Local head of infrastructure Martínez Mus said the move had been taken to ensure emergency services could use the roads freely and to guarantee the supply of water, energy, communications, and food distribution.
In response to looting, Sánchez said he would double the number of civil guard and national police on the streets, after more than 80 people were arrested.
One Aldaia resident told AFP he saw thieves grabbing items from an abandoned supermarket as “people are a bit desperate”.
Areas across the south – including Huelva and Cartaya – have also been hit by heavy rains, while hundreds of families in the city of Jerez have had to be evacuated from their homes.
One of the reasons the flooding has been so severe is a lack of rainfall during the rest of the year, which left the ground in many areas in the east and south unable to absorb rainwater efficiently.
The region of Chiva near Valencia saw as much rainfall in one eight-hour period on Tuesday as it would normally see in an entire year, according to state meteorological agency Aemet.
The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.
In a preliminary report, World Weather Attribution (WWA), a group of international scientists who investigate global warming’s role in extreme weather, estimated that the rainfall was 12% heavier than it would otherwise have been, and that such weather even itself was twice as likely.
Additional reporting by Mallory Moench
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