Spain’s worst floods in a century kill almost 100 in Valencia region, with some victims still trapped in cars

Dramatic flooding killed at least 95 people in Spain between Tuesday night and Wednesday, and the toll was expected to rise as search and rescue operations continued Thursday morning. Roads transformed into raging rivers with little warning as flash floods tore through the eastern region of Valencia, with muddy rapids flinging parked cars around like tin cans in the worst natural disaster to hit the European nation in a century.

Some areas got more than a typical year’s worth of rainfall in just eight hours. 

There were dramatic rescues, including a couple who were left trapped on the second floor of a house until they were scooped to safety by a front end loader. Denis Hlavaty braved the muddy onslaught trapped overnight inside a gas station.

“I’m smiling so I don’t cry,” he said as he walked away from the site of his refuge. “It was a living hell.”

The Valencia suburb of Barrio de la Torre looked like it had been hit by a hurricane on Thursday. Cars were stacked on top of each other on mud-choked roads, with uprooted trees and downed power lines woven through the mess. Most of the confirmed deaths as of Thursday morning were in the town.

“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it’s literally smashed up,” local bar owner Christian Viena told The Associated Press.

The rains had stopped by late Wednesday, leaving rescue workers to turn largely to the grim task of recovering victims.

“Unfortunately, there are dead people inside some vehicles,” national Transport Minister Óscar Puente said.

Spanish authorities deployed about 1,000 soldiers to help search for survivors and recover victims from under the mud-caked debris. 

The country’s defense minister said soldiers had recovered 22 bodies and rescued 110 people by Wednesday night.

“We are searching house by house,” military rescue unit leader Ángel Martínez told the RNE national radio network Thursday from the northern Valencian town of Utiel, where there were at least six people confirmed dead.

“The sorrow is the people who have died, and there have been many,” said Encarna, a teacher in Utiel, as she surveyed the ruins of her home. “These are my savings, my efforts, my life. But we are alive.”

Climate scientists blame the scale of the disaster on a confluence of factors linked to human-caused climate change; the warmer atmosphere enables storm systems to retain more moisture, a slowing jet stream didn’t push the storm away quickly, and the parched, drought-stricken Valencian soil couldn’t absorb the catastrophic downpour.

The inundation left train lines and major roads impassable, leaving Valencia still partly isolated on Thursday. 

The high-speed rail service linking the provincial capital of Valencia city to the national capital of Madrid was unlikely to be back in service before the weekend, officials said.

While Valencia was left mired in debris and devastation that was sure to take many weeks to clean up, the entire country was mired in grief.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was heading to the region Thursday — the first day of a three-day official mourning period — to see the destruction himself.

Chris Livesay

Chris Livesay is a CBS News foreign correspondent based in Rome.