Sea came inland at Valencia

On the night of October 29, the sea came inland at Valencia, and the phrase is not metaphor: the water that had fallen from the sky as rain moved through the ravines and the dry riverbeds of eastern Spain as a wall of mud and flood, and the streets of the towns along the coast, from Utiel to Paiporta to the suburbs of the city itself, became rivers that carried cars, buses and people. The storm was a DANA, the ‘cold drop’ of the Mediterranean meteorology, a pocket of cold air that stalled over the warm sea and emptied itself over the land; the rain that fell in the province in a few hours, on the 29th and into the night, was measured in some places as a year’s worth in a single day. The floods killed more than two hundred people, most of them in the province of Valencia, the worst natural disaster in Spain in living memory, and the toll, the authorities warned, was not yet final.

The geography of the catastrophe was specific. The worst of the rain fell inland, in the valleys that drain the mountains toward the coast, and the towns that sat in the path of the flood were the ones that the warnings, such as they were, had not prepared. The warnings that were issued arrived too late for the communities that needed them most; the residents of Paiporta and the surrounding towns described receiving the emergency alerts on their phones hours after the water had already arrived, and the decision to hold schools and work in place, when the authorities had been watching the storm develop through the day, became the subject of the first inquiries within days of the flood.

The storm was a weather event, and the deaths were a human event, and the connection between them is being argued in the way such connections always are. The ‘cold drop’ is a regular feature of the Mediterranean autumn, and the scientists of the region were quick to place the disaster in the context of a warming climate: the warmer sea puts more moisture into the air, the storms become more violent, the rains that once came as a season now arrive as an event. The attribution studies will take their time, and the political argument has already begun, the central government and the regional government trading responsibility for the warnings, the response and the rescue.

The rescue itself was the other story of the days that followed. The mud that filled the streets was too deep for the vehicles, the helicopters flew where the roads failed, the volunteers came from across the country, the army arrived with the machines that the flood had overwhelmed, and the photographs of the neighbours digging with their hands became the images of the week. The disaster was national, and the response was, in the best sense, national too, and the argument about the warnings will run alongside the argument about the recovery.

The flood has joined the short list of European disasters that the continent measures its climate against, the summer floods of Germany, the heat of the south, the droughts of the reservoirs. The Mediterranean storm that killed more than two hundred people in the space of a night was the latest and the worst reminder that the weather of the warming world is not a future condition but a present one, and that the warnings, the infrastructure and the memories of the towns in the flood’s path will need to be rebuilt together, because the next ‘cold drop’ is not a question of whether but of when. The sea came inland at Valencia, and the recovery will be measured in years, and the lessons, if they are learned, in the warnings that the next storm will bring.