After a severe flood in the Valencia region of Spain, cars are piling up and rescue teams are looking for missing people and trying to clear the roads. While some residents scramble to save their belongings, others are fleeing the hardest-hit areas and seeking refuge with friends and relatives. The regional government set up emergency shelters for people whose homes were destroyed or uninhabitable due to a natural disaster.

The floods that devastated parts of southeastern Spain, including the regions of Andalusia, Castilla La Mancha and Murcia, are the worst in modern history. Authorities say more than 200 people have died, mostly in Valencia. The latter had been on “red alert” since Tuesday, and only on Thursday afternoon authorities finally downgraded the alert to “orange” or “yellow” for most areas.

Are authorities too slow to act?

A growing number of people accuse Spanish authorities of being too slow to raise the alarm. Reports indicate that Valencia’s regional civil protection agency did not send out mobile phone alerts (so-called ES Alert) until 8pm on Tuesday. Spanish authorities use an emergency alert system that allows them to send alerts to all mobile phones in the area when there is a crisis. But by then, southwestern Spain, including Valencia, had endured 48 hours of heavy rains, causing small rivers to burst their banks and roads to be flooded.

Authorities in Valencia and other nearby areas conducted a trial run of phone alerts as recently as last Sunday. According to the local newspaper, after the first failure, they ran a second alert, which arrived at end devices with a ten-minute delay. Valencia Plaza.

But Carlos Mazon, head of the Valencia regional government, does not blame technical problems with phone messaging. Instead, he emphasized that authorities should follow proper protocol to inform the public. On Wednesday, he released a video about .

Heavy rains are not uncommon in Spain. The phenomenon known as “gota fria” or cold fall, especially in the southeast, is used to refer to very heavy downpours occurring in this region. Although it has been known for a long time, meteorologists are still puzzled by this phenomenon, says Andreas Walter of the German Meteorological Service. “In principle, cold drops can appear in weather models. But exactly where the rain will fall and how much it will occur can usually be predicted only a few hours before the event,” Walter said. he said.

This is also reflected in the warnings issued by the Spanish State Meteorological Agency (AEMET). Heavy rains were expected across the south of the country last weekend. Since Saturday, meteorologists have changed the forecast several times and severe weather warnings have been issued for several parts of Spain. Some municipalities in Valencia even closed schools on Tuesday.

On Tuesday morning, AEMET raised the weather warning for the province of Valencia from “orange” to “red”. The regional government followed suit at 7:47 that morning, according to the Spanish news outlet. La Razon. About an hour later, the local emergency center advised people to avoid driving unless absolutely necessary.

Shortly before noon, a warning was sent to residents of towns along the Magro river, which flows west to east through the province of Valencia. They were instructed not to approach the river as it could burst its banks. At the time, the Emergency Operations Center of the state of Valenciana was already posting weather updates and storm-related warnings on X (formerly Twitter). Just before 4 p.m., the agency released video showing streets flooded with muddy water in the Utiel-Requena wine region, near the source of Magro. At this time the ES Alert phone message was still set to “orange”.

Parallels from Germany?

Following the devastating floods that hit Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany in 2021, there was also a lot of criticism that the authorities did not warn residents in time. 141 people died and almost 800 were injured in the Rhineland-Palatinate flood. Approximately 500 buildings were destroyed and another 2,500 were damaged.

“We first need more data from Spain to make comparisons with the flooding in the Ahr valley,” German weather expert Walter told DW. “But it is already clear that the amount of rain falling on Spain was much higher than the amount of rain falling on the Ahr valley at that time.”

Walter told DW that not only the amount of precipitation but also the relevant geographical structure plays a role. “For example, if the precipitation in the Ahr valley had fallen a little further north, the consequences would not have been so catastrophic,” he points out.

This is due to the plains in the region around Cologne and Bonn, a largely flat terrain where rainfall has less dangerous consequences than in places such as the narrow Ahr valley.

This article has been translated from German