What happened
At least 95 people are dead in eastern and southern Spain and more are missing after torrential rainfall Tuesday and Wednesday caused the country’s worst flooding since 1996. The death toll was expected to rise.
Who said what
“The whole of Spain weeps with you,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told Spaniards affected by the flooding. “We won’t abandon you.” Most of the reported deaths were in Valencia. Witnesses “described nightmarish scenarios” of flash floods “turning roads into rivers of floating cars and cutting off highways and access points,” The Washington Post said.
The extreme weather was “the result of the gota fría — literally ‘cold drop,'” said El País. This cold front dropping suddenly on the unusually warm Mediterranean Sea caused the worst stream of thunderstorms “of the 21st century.” Andalusia “received four times the amount of rain typical for October in a single day,” The New York Times said, citing Spain’s meteorological agency, and in Valencia, the village of Chiva got “practically a year’s worth” of rain in just eight hours.
The “disaster in Spain is the latest in a series of generational flood events across Europe and around the globe” that scientists partially attribute to climate change, the Post said. On the flip side, The Associated Press said, “a bone-dry October is pushing nearly half of the United States into a flash drought.”
What next?
Sánchez declared three days of national mourning and promised affected towns that Spain will help “rebuild your houses, plazas, bridges.”