Spain flooding: Red rain warning issued as death toll climbs and authorities criticised for response

Spain’s state meteorological agency has issued a red weather warning for parts of Andalucía throughout Friday morning as the death toll from flash floods this week jumped to 158.
The floods wreaked havoc across the Mediterranean region of Valencia, as well as parts of the neighbouring regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalucía on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The red weather warning from the meteorological agency Aemet for the Huelva area of Andalucía remains in place until 10am on Friday. It noted that accumulated precipitation overnight reached 140 mm.
Emergency personnel meanwhile are continuing to search for the many people who were still missing.
“The priority right now is to find the victims, those who are missing, to calm the anguish and the anxiety that their families are suffering,” said prime minister Pedro Sánchez on Thursday. His government declared the areas affected disaster zones, facilitating the deployment of aid.
In many parts of Valencia, streets remain filled with mud and debris, with cars overturned and piled on top of each other. In some areas drinking water is scarce and thousands of homes remained without electricity.
About 150 roads were still blocked. Rail services also continued to be severely disrupted, and the government said the high-speed rail link between Madrid and Valencia would be out of use for two to three weeks.
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Among the latest deaths reported were eight people in the town of La Torre, whose bodies were found in a garage where they had been unable to escape the flood waters.
Local people in some of the worst-affected areas have complained about a lack of help from the authorities.
The mayor of Alfafar, Juan Ramón Adsuara, told local media there were people in the town “living alongside corpses in their homes”. Emergency services had not yet reached the town, he said. “We are organising ourselves but everything is running out.”
A total of 39 people were arrested for looting from shops on Wednesday night.
“When we saw that nobody is bringing us water, nobody is telling us anything, we’ve decided to go to the supermarket and grab what we can,” one woman carrying bags of goods told Spanish television in the town of Paiporta.
Paiporta has become emblematic of the tragedy. It has reported 45 deaths and is struggling with the aftermath of the flooding.
Much of the discontent in Valencia is aimed at the regional government. It has been accused of warning about the weather event too late – it issued an alert to people’s phones only on Tuesday night, when the flood waters were already rising.
On Thursday night, the rainfall moved across the southwest and 300 families were evacuated from their homes in Jerez, as the Guadalete river started to swell.