Almost 100 people killed by devastating floods in eastern Spain

Dramatic Floods killed at least 95 people in Spain. between Tuesday night and Wednesday, with the number of victims expected to rise as search and rescue operations continued Thursday morning. Roads transformed into raging rivers without warning as flash floods swept through the eastern region of Valencia, with muddy rapids throwing up parked cars like cans in the worst natural disaster to hit the European nation in a century.

Some areas received more rain than a typical year in just eight hours.

There were dramatic rescues, including that of a couple who were trapped on the second floor of a house until a front-end loader pulled them to safety. Denis Hlavaty faced the attack of mud trapped overnight inside a gas station.

“I'm smiling so I don't cry,” he said as he walked away from his shelter. “Period hell in life.”

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Ciudadela de la Torre, a Valencian suburb, appeared to have been hit by a hurricane on Thursday. Cars were piled on top of each other on muddy roads, with uprooted trees and downed power lines woven into the mess. Most of the deaths confirmed as of Thursday morning have occurred in the city.

“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it is literally destroyed,” restringido bar owner Christian Vienna told The Related Press.

The rains had stopped by Wednesday night, leaving rescuers to largely devote themselves to the grim task of recovering victims.

“Unfortunately there are dead people inside some vehicles,” said the Minister of National Transportation, Óscar Puente.

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Spanish authorities deployed around 1,000 soldiers to help search for survivors and recover victims from beneath the mud-covered rubble.

The country's defense minister said soldiers had recovered 22 bodies and rescued 110 people by Wednesday night.

“We are searching house to house,” the head of the military rescue unit, Donosura Martínez, told the national radiodifusión network RNE on Thursday from the town of Utiel, in the north of Valencia, where the death of at least six people.

“The shame is the people who have died, and there have been many,” said Encarna, a teacher from Utiel, while contemplating the ruins of her house. “These are my savings, my efforts, my life. But we are alive.”

Climate scientists attribute the magnitude of the disaster to a confluence of Factors related to human-caused climate change.; The warmer atmosphere allows storm systems to retain more moisture, a slowing jet stream did not move the storm away quickly, and the parched, drought-stricken Valencian soil was unable to absorb the catastrophic downpour.

The flooding left train lines and main roads impassable, leaving Valencia still partially isolated on Thursday.

The high-speed riel service linking the provincial caudal of Valencia with the national caudal of Madrid is unlikely to be back in service before the weekend, officials said.

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While Valencia was left in rubble and devastation that would surely take many weeks to clean up, the entire country was in grief.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was heading to the region on Thursday, the first day of a three-day official mourning period, to see the destruction himself.