Walking over the bridges of the Turia river into the southern suburbs of Valencia is to cross a threshold from the present into a disquieting future. The centre of Valencia’s old city looks much as it usually would at this time of year. Restaurants and hotels are open, and the city streets are clean and dry. Only the closed flooded metro stations and the mud-caked boats of rescue volunteers offer any clue of the environmental catastrophe a few miles way.
When extreme rain hit the wider Valencia region last week all eyes were on the new shape of the Turia, an artificial riverbed and flood barrier built to divert stormwater away from Valencia’s old city and out to the open sea. What had not been accounted for was a smaller river further west, the Rambla del Poyo. At its peak the river was running two metres higher than the top of its gorge, ripping away concrete bridges and pulling houses into the torrent. When the water could not flow along its natural course it began to move southwards through the city’s suburbs.
Entering the suburban villages of La Torre and Paiporta the streets are busy with bulldozers and army trucks. Each morning thousands of volunteers march across the bridges from Valencia’s city centre into La Torre armed with brooms and shovels. They work until sunset to dig out the layer of mud and debris that was left when the waters receded. When the flood came it was not a slow rise but “like a tsunami”—as Miguel Santos, a factory worker in one of the industrial units in La Torre, tells me. There was no rain, people were out shopping or cooking dinner. The moment the water arrived they were trapped where they stood. As the water gathered pace it became a viscous cocktail, picking up cars, trees, concrete dust and debris, breaking windows and doors.
By the time the Spanish government sent emergency warnings to residents, many were already marooned. Those trapped on open ground between the villages were swept downriver. This week, some bodies were retrieved from the sea only after they had floated to the surface. Between the groves of orange trees, cars lie upturned and crushed. The main railway line in the south of Valencia was lifted clean off the trackbed. People climbed trees as the water splashed at their heels.
This level of storm damage is usually only seen in tropical cyclones, but what happened in Spain was a dangerous mix of climate change, geography and infrastructural failure. A year’s worth of rainfall from an area of low-pressure was emptied onto the hills west of Valencia in a single day. Increased evaporation due to raised ocean temperatures meant that the pocket of air was incredibly humid. When this area hit the mountains and could not move, it released unprecedented amounts of water into the streams that feed down into the rivers of the coastal plain. Here what were originally small villages have over the decades grown into towns on the flat ground around the gorge of the Rambla del Poyo. What made the Valencia flood so deadly was the way the water was held back in the deep gorge before suddenly being released, like a rupturing tank.
In the ruins of what was a family home, I find balloons celebrating a birthday party still hanging from the rafters, abandoned when the doors from the street gave way under the weight of water. Television shots do not do justice to the trauma of what has happened in the towns and villages to the west of the Turia. “Our front door just exploded and the water began to rush in,” José, a local electrician, tells me. He survived by climbing onto the roof of an outhouse with his neighbours. He did not know whether his wife was alive until she was rescued from a nearby factory where she had taken shelter. Many never came home at all.
Wandering south on foot through the ankle-deep mud of Paiporta and the neighbouring village of Catarroja, I find myself alone in the underground carpark of an abandoned Ikea store. Cars lie flipped over together with shopping trolleys and pieces of flatpack furniture that were being loaded into car boots when the waters came. As I walk past the damp concrete columns, the motion sensors in the ceiling make the lights come on automatically, revealing more and more destruction in the shadows.
The scale of damage in Valencia is incomprehensible. I walked for 20km through the flood hit areas with a camera and radio microphone, and everyone I spoke to told me the same story. Whole communities have been completely decimated; hundreds of lives lost; countless businesses wiped out. Had the city of Valencia itself not been protected by the Turia flood barriers, it could have been far worse.
We are currently on track for well above 2°C of global warming, and all the science we have tells us that sudden intense rainfalls like the Spanish storms will become increasingly common. So too will hurricanes and intense heat events as the extremes of the weather cycle move further outside the envelope of our ability to manage them. After Valencia, nobody can say they were not warned: this is what unmitigated climate collapse looks like.
