TThe gratitude that greeted Tuesday’s rain showers was short-lived in Utiel. When the long-awaited rain showers finally reached the city in the drought-stricken Valencia region of eastern Spain, they were brutal in their abundance.

“In the beginning, people were very happy because they had prayed for rain because their land needed water,” said Remedios, who owns a bar in Utiel. “But at noon the storm had really started and we were all quite scared.”

Trapped in the bar, she and a handful of her customers could only watch as Spain’s worst floods in almost three decades caused the River Magro to overflow its banks, trapping some residents in their homes and destroying cars and garbage bins flew through the streets. on muddy flood water.

“The rising water brought mud and stones and they were so strong that they broke the road surface,” said Remedios, who gave only her first name.

“The tunnel leading into the city was half full of mud, trees had fallen and cars and waste containers were driving through the streets. My outdoor patio has been destroyed – the chairs and umbrellas have all been swept away. It’s just a disaster.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the death toll in Valencia and the neighboring regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia stood at 95. The mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, told Las Provincias newspaper that some of the city’s residents had not survived the floods, but could not give an exact number give.

Hours earlier, Gabaldón had told Spanish national broadcaster RTVE that Tuesday had been the worst day of his life. “We were trapped like rats,” he said. “Cars and dumpsters flooded the streets. The water rose to three meters.”

People in the city fear that some of the dead may be elderly people who were unable to escape the floodwaters. Remedios said: “Everyone who could move up did so, but there were some old people who couldn’t even open their front door and they were locked there in their own house.”

Residents of La Torre, on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, were confronted with similar scenes on Wednesday morning.

“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are stacked on top of each other, it is literally destroyed,” Christian Viena, a cafe owner in the area, told the Associated Press by telephone. “Everything is a total wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost a foot deep.”

Spain’s meteorological agency, Aemet, said more than 300 liters of rain per square meter (30 cm) fell on Tuesday in the area between Utiel and the town of Chiva, 50 km away. In Chiva, the report noted, almost an entire year’s worth of rain had fallen in just eight hours.

The heavy rains have come while Spain continues to suffer a punishing drought. Last year the government approved an unprecedented €2.2 billion plan to help farmers and consumers cope with the continued lack of rain, amid warnings that the climate would only become worse and more unpredictable in the future.

“Spain is a country accustomed to periods of drought, but there is no doubt that as a result of the climate change we are experiencing, we are seeing much more frequent and intense events and phenomena,” said Environment Minister Teresa Ribera. , said.

As Wednesday wore on, a disturbing picture of the human and economic damage began to emerge. Spain has declared three days of national mourning.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said the entire country felt the pain of those who had lost their loved ones and urged people to take all possible precautions as torrential rains moved to the country’s northeast.

Defense Minister Margarita Robles said 1,000 members of the military emergency response unit had been deployed to assist regional emergency services. In a sign that more bodies could be stuck in mud and in homes, she also offered mobile morgues.

One man called RTVE to plead for news about his son, Leonardo Enrique Rivera, who went missing from his Fiat van after going to work as a delivery driver in the Valencian town of Riba-roja on Tuesday.

“I haven’t heard from him since 6:55 yesterday,” said Leonardo Enrique. “It was raining heavily and then I got a message that the van was flooded and had been hit by another vehicle. That was the last I heard.”

Esther Gómez, a municipal councilor in Riba-roja, said workers were trapped overnight in an industrial estate “without a chance to rescue them” as rivers flooded. “It has been a long time since this happened and we are scared,” she told Agence France-Presse.

As the search for the dead continued, experts warned that the torrential rains and subsequent flooding were further evidence of the reality of the climate crisis.

“There is no doubt that these explosive rainfall events were amplified by climate change,” said Dr Friederike Otto, leader of global weather attribution at the Center for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London.

“With every fraction of a degree of warming from fossil fuels, the atmosphere can retain more moisture, leading to heavier rainfall. These deadly floods are yet another reminder of how dangerous climate change has become at just 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming. But last week the UN warned that we are on track to experience 3.1 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.”

There were similar, albeit differently expressed, sentiments in Utiel on Wednesday. “Yesterday there was a man here with me, 73 years old, and he said he had never seen anything like it in all his years,” Remedios said. “Never.”