Some areas received more rain in eight hours than in the previous 20 months.
flash floods caused by heavy downpours in eastern Spain swept away everything in their path in a matter of minutes.
Pictures of vehicles washed into piles have been plastered across social media.
With no time to react, Spaniards were trapped in cars as their homes and businesses were destroyed.
Two days later, authorities have recovered 158 bodies—155 in the eastern Valencia region alone, two in Castilla-La Mancha, and one in Andalusia—and continue to search for an unknown number of missing people.
People have begun to clean up the thick layers of mud that covered houses and streets full of debris, all while facing power and water cuts and shortages of some basic goods.How Did Spain’s Flash Floods Get So Bad?
Storms concentrated over the Magro and Turia river basins, producing more than a year’s worth of rain in just one day.
The Poyo riverbed produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unaware as they went on with their daily lives, with many coming home from work on Tuesday evening.
In the blink of an eye, the muddy water covered roads and railways and entered houses and businesses in villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia city. Drivers scrambled onto car roofs while residents sought refuge on higher ground.
The downpour has stunned the country. Spain’s national weather service said that in the hard-hit locality of Chiva, it rained more in eight hours than it had in the preceding 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary.”
When the authorities sent alerts to mobile phones warning of the seriousness of the phenomenon and asked them to stay at home, many were on the road, working, or covered in water in low-lying areas or garages.Why Did Spain Produce So Much Rain in One Day?
Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change.
One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain.
