The Beeb bring a detailed account of the 2024 fatal flooding…
On 29 October 2024 a powerful storm hit the area around Valencia in Spain. Torrential rain fell on the hills to the west of the city, causing devastating flash floods. Across the province, 228 people died. It was Europe’s deadliest single, storm flood since 1967.
This film tells the story of what happened that day, through dramatic mobile-phone footage taken as floodwater poured through streets, inundated houses and turned parked cars into lethal, floating projectiles. We hear first-hand accounts from survivors who had close escapes and discover from leading scientists how climate change and the places we are choosing to build could put many more people at risk of floods in the future.
Among the eyewitnesses, we meet Rosalía Arenas, a resident of Utiel, who took refuge on the upper floor of her house with her mother and two-year-old daughter as floodwater filled the ground floor to within inches of the ceiling. They were eventually rescued by boat from an upstairs window.
Andries Klarenberg, a resident of Paiporta, the town worst hit by the flood with 46 people fatalities, tells us how he witnessed people driving their cars up from underground garages to try to save them from the flood, just before local river, the Rambla del Poyo, broke its banks. As water poured through the streets, turning the parked cars into lethal, floating projectiles. Andries says, “The pavements, the roads, everything was flooded with three feet of water, which was pushing cars down the streets, into buildings. The headlights of the cars reflecting off of, like, rivers of water where streets were.”
Karen-Marie Loftus recounts her terrifying experience on a Spanish motorway when floodwater filled the carriageway bringing traffic to a halt. “After about five minutes, the water started to come in to the bottom of the car.” says Karen. “The water continued to rise to the point that our car engine did cut out.” When the car she was in started floating, she and her husband had to climb through a window to escape. “Within ten minutes I was having to get out of my car window into what was a muddy, freezing cold torrent of water” she recalls.
Daniel Burguet and four young children were trapped inside the English language school he runs in Paiporta. With no second floor to climb to, Daniel waded through floodwater and broke the door of a nearby block of flats to get the children to safety.
The storm was extraordinary. One location recorded 771mm (2ft 6 inches) of rain in 14 hours. The rainfall was so extreme, that it broke the Spanish records for the most rain in an hour and the most rain in 12 hours.
However, the authorities’ failure to protect people and their slow response to the disaster caused widespread anger. When Spain’s King and Queen visited the area, along with the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, they were heckled and pelted with mud. Shortly after, a crowd of 130,000 people demanded the resignation of Valencia’s leader, Carlos Mazón.
At the heart of the grievances is a mobile phone alert that was sent out across Valencia at 8.11pm, about two hours after the flood began and when many people were already dead. We investigate why the alert was so late. Defending the regional government’s response, Carlos Mazon said the disaster was more devastating than any Spain had seen in recent history, that they lacked the information they needed, and that the text alert system had never been used in the region before.
The film also looks at a new flood warning system developed in the United States, that might have provided an earlier warning. Called FLASH, the system uses weather radar to work out how much rain is falling from a storm. It then runs this information through a computer to work out where that rain will flow once it reaches the ground and where it could cause a flood. It covers the whole of the USA and Jonathan Gourley, who lead the team that developed it, claims it can predict a flood in less than 17 minutes.
As the human population grows, around the world more people are living in areas liable to flood. This is also an issue for the United Kingdom, with an estimated 1 in 13 new homes built in a flood zone. Hannah Cloke, Professor of Hydrology
at the University of Reading says, “We’ve got a lot of pressure to build new houses all of the time and that, of course, makes it very difficult to protect those places such as floodplains, where we don’t really want people living because they can be dangerous.”
The effects of global warming could make this problem worse. Prof Liz Bentley, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society says, “We know that a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. So for every one degree of global average temperature increase, the atmosphere can hold about 7% more moisture. So more moisture in the atmosphere means that when it rains, the rainfall is heavier than it used to be.”
Professor Elizabeth Kendon of Bristol University has used Met office computers to study how climate change could affect rainfall patterns in the UK in the future. “For every degree of warming in the UK, we expect a 5 to 15% increase in the intensity of rainfall”, she says. “We expect big increases in the intensity of rainfall and in many cases, the sort of the drainage systems that we have are not able to cope with these sort of increases.”
Why Cities Flood: Spain’s Deadly Disaster, BBC One, Tuesday 24th June at 9pm. Also on the iPlayer.
