Many Victims in Spain Were Caught in Parking Garages

The mayor of Paiporta, a town on the outskirts of Valencia, says parking garages became death traps during Spain's worst flooding in living memory. "In Paiporta, we don't tend to have floods and people aren't afraid," Maribel Albalat tells the BBC. "When it rains people normally go down to their garages to get their cars out in case their garage is flooded." But after a year's worth of rain fell in the space of a few hours, floodwaters rushed in while many residents were in their garages. The death toll in Valencia province has risen to more than 200, including 62 in Paiporta. Seven victims were found in a single garage at a residential building in the town's La Torre neighborhood.

Another six people died in Paiporta when flooding hit a care home as residents were having dinner on the ground floor. The Guardian reports that most residents were saved by "staff wading frantically through knee-deep waters" to carry them to higher floors. Other elderly people died trapped in ground-floor apartments. Albalat and other Paiporta residents say Valencia's civil protection service didn't send a warning to cell phones until around 8pm Tuesday, when it was already far too late for many people trapped by rising waters, CNN reports.

• "It was like a tsunami," Paiporta resident Carmen Aviles tells the New York Times. She says she saw people stick their heads out of car windows and cry for help as floodwaters carried the vehicles away. "The worst was to see people die," the 53-year-old says. "It swallowed them up."

• The death toll currently stands at 205, including 202 in Valencia province, and it is expected to rise. The BBC reports motorists were trapped on the A3 highway between Valencia and Madrid. The mayor of Chiva, around 19 miles from Valencia city, says there were "hundreds of cars turned upside down and they will surely have people inside them." One witness described seeing a man get out of his car and strap himself to a lamppost with his belt to avoid being washed away.
• The flooding was especially devastating because Spain has been in drought for almost two years, meaning the ground was too hard to absorb much water, the AP reports. Clare Nullis, a spokesperson for the World Meteorological Organization, says climate change has made the hydrological cycle erratic unpredictable. "We are facing growing problems of either too much water or too little," she says. "And that's what we're seeing playing out in Spain at the moment."

(More Spain stories.)