TORRENTIAL RAIN HAS struck the Catalonia region just days after massive flooding which killed more than 200 people, mostly near Valencia.
The toll stands at 217 dead, with the country dreading the discovery of more corpses as an unknown number of people remain missing.
While Spain’s national weather service AEMET announced the end of the emergency for Valencia, heavy rain hit Catalonia, where residents received telephone alerts urging the utmost caution.
Mobile phones issued an alert over “extreme and continued rainfall” on the southern outskirts of Barcelona, with people to avoid any normally dry gorges or canals.
Barcelona’s El Prat airport, Spain’s second busiest, has cancelled over 70 flights and 17 were diverted after the terminal building flooded.
The city also closed some flooded metro stations and regional trains were suspended.
Classes were also cancelled in Tarragona, a city in southern Catalonia about halfway between Barcelona and Valencia, after a red alert for rains was issued.
This red alert has since been downgraded to an orange warning.
Meanwhile, in Valencia, the search continued for bodies inside houses and thousands of wrecked cars strewn in the streets, on major roads, and in canals that channelled last week’s deluge into populated areas.
Citizens, volunteers and thousands of soldiers and police officers are helping in the massive clean-up effort of mud and debris.
Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said authorities are still unable to give a reliable estimate of the amount of people who are missing.
Divers today concentrated their search for missing bodies in the town of Aldaia, where some 50 soldiers, police and firefighters, some wearing wetsuits, searched in a huge shopping centre’s underground car park for possible victims.
They used a small boat and spotlights to move around in the huge structure with vehicles submerged in at least 3ft of murky water.
The Bonaire shopping mall’s 1,800 underground parking spaces quickly filled with water and mud on Tuesday and Wednesday when the southern outskirts of Valencia were hit by a tsunami-like flooding event. The team is using four pumps to remove the water.
Local authorities in Valencia also extended travel restrictions for another two days, cancelled classes and urged residents to work from home to facilitate the work of the emergency services.
Many people feel abandoned by authorities, with their anger erupting yesterday when a crowd tossed mud at Spain’s royal couple, the Prime Minister and regional leaders as they made their first visit to Paiporta, where more than 60 people died and the survivors lost their homes and still do not have drinking water.
Spain is used to autumn storms that can lead to flooding, but the latest ones have produced the deadliest floods in living memory for Spaniards.
-With additional reporting from Press Association
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say