Cars are piled up and rescue workers are searching for missing people, trying to clear roads in the Spanish region of Valencia after the region was hit by severe flooding. Some residents are scrambling to salvage belongings while others are leaving the worst-affected areas and seeking shelter with friends and relatives. The regional government has set up emergency shelters for people whose homes have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by the natural disaster.

The floods that have devastasted parts of southeastern Spain, including areas of Andalusia, Castilla La Mancha and Murcia, are the worst in modern history. Authorities say that over 200 people have died, most of them in Valencia. The latter had been on "red alert" since Tuesday and it was only on Thursday afternoon that authorities finally downgraded the warning for most regions to "orange" or "yellow."

Authorities too slow to act?

A growing number of people are now accusing Spanish authorities of having been too slow to raise the alarm. Reports indicate that Valencia’s regional civil protection did not send out cell phone warnings — a so-called ES Alert — until around 8 p.m. on Tuesday. The Spanish authorities use an emergency alert system that allows them to send warnings to all the mobile phones in an area when there’s a crisis. By that time though, southwestern Spain, including Valencia, had already endured 48 hours of heavy rainfall, causing small rivers to burst their banks and roads to flood.

It was only last Sunday that the Valencia authorities and the authorities in other nearby regions did a test run for the phone alerts. After an initial failure, they ran a second alert which then arrived on end devices with a delay of ten minutes, according to local newspaper Valencia Plaza.

But the head of Valencia’s regional government, Carlos Mazon, hasn’t blamed technical problems for the phone messaging. Instead he stressed that authorities had to follow the correct protocol for notifying the population. On Wednesday, he posted a video on X (above) in which Valencia's fire chief Jose Miguel Basset confirmed this, pointing out that such warnings are sent to thousands of people and that caution is required before sending them out, to avoid causing overreactions or panic.

Heavy rainfall is not uncommon in Spain. In the southeast in particular, what’s known as a "gota fria" or cold drop, is used to refer to very heavy downpours that happen in this area. Meteorologists are still puzzled by the phenomenon although it has been known about for a long time, says Andreas Walter of the German Weather Service. "In principle, cold drops can be seen in the weather models. But where exactly the rain will fall and how much there will be, can often only be estimated a few hours before the event," Walter said.

This is reflected in the warnings issued by Spain's State Meteorological Agency (AEMET). Heavy rainfall was announced for last weekend throughout the country's south. Since Saturday, meteorologists have repeatedly adjusted forecasts and there were severe weather warnings for various parts of Spain. Some municipalities in Valencia even shut schools on Tuesday.

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

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

Parallels from Germany?

Following devasting floods that hit Rhineland-Palatinate, in Germany, in 2021, there was also a lot of criticism that authorities had failed to warn residents in time. The Rhineland-Palatinate floods claimed the lives of 141 people and injured almost 800 more. Around 500 buildings were destroyed and a further 2,500 damaged.

"In order to be able to make a comparison with the Ahr valley flood, we first need more data from Spain," German weather expert Walter tells DW. "However, it is already clear that the amount of rain that fell in Spain is far greater than the amount that fell in the Ahr valley at the time."

It is not just the amount of rainfall but also the respective geographical makeup that plays a role, Walter told DW. "If, for example, the Ahr valley rainfall had only come down a little further north, the consequences would not have been so catastrophic," he points out.

This is due to the lowlands in the area around Cologne and Bonn, a largely flat landscape where rainfall has less dangerous consequences than in places like the narrow Ahr valley.

This article was translated from German