(Bloomberg) -- Relief efforts to rescue victims trapped by the disastrous storms that have killed more than 150 people in eastern Spain are in their third day, as rain continues to spread in other parts of the country.
Storms wreaked havoc in towns as far as 63 miles (101 kilometers) inland from the coast, with much of the damage centered outside the city of Valencia. Rainfall began on Monday, and reached peak intensity on Tuesday night. One town saw as much rain in eight hours as it normally gets in a year, according to the national weather agency.
The Valencian government reported on Thursday afternoon that 155 deaths have been recorded. Several more people have died in other regions.
The storms represent one of the worst natural disasters in living memory in Spain. Entire towns in the coastal region of Valencia were inaccessible for more than a day, with people sheltering on roofs and in cars. Many are still without running water and electricity.
“The priority right now is to find the victims, the missing people, to calm the anxiety and anguish that their relatives may be suffering,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Thursday on a visit to Valencia. The regional government has announced that it will earmark at least $271 million to help with the recovery.
Questions are already being raised about why civil authorities waited so long to tell people to seek shelter, and why infrastructure such as roads, bridges and train lines was unable to withstand the downpours.
While weather services notified the public on Monday that big storms were likely to hit Valencia, the main emergency alert didn’t go out until Tuesday evening, when storms were already in full force.
The city of Valencia was spared the brunt of the damage thanks to river-rerouting measures that were implemented after a devastating storm in 1957 killed as many as 100 people. The outskirts of the city, where the worst-hit areas are located, did not have any such protection, said Luis Mediero, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
While Mediero said floods of this magnitude occur about every two centuries, he also blamed the damage on a decision to put up new buildings very close to a creek that flooded earlier this week.
“Maybe they were built where they shouldn’t have been,” he said.
Rains have subsided in Valencia but are moving, with less intensity, to other parts of the country. There is an orange warning for severe rain in the northeastern province of Tarragona, according to national forecaster Aemet, and a red warning in nearby Castellon. Yellow warnings for thunderstorms also extend through the Barcelona area and as far north as the border with France.
Valencia is Spain’s third-largest city, and the broader region is one of the country’s most popular tourist destinations. In recent decades, it has seen enormous amounts of beach-side real estate development, which experts now say was built without considering the risk of severe storms.
Politicians have already begun to cast blame over the disaster. On Thursday, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, leader of the opposition People’s Party, which governs Valencia, said that the regional government had acted based on information it had gotten from the national weather agency and the department that oversees rivers. Both of those rely on the central government, which is currently under Socialist leadership.
Such extreme storms, known in Spain as “danas,” are likely to become more common as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of heat waves. Record temperatures in the Mediterranean are also strengthening their effects.
--With assistance from Clara Hernanz Lizarraga and Thomas Gualtieri.
(Updates with Sanchez trip and comment in fifth paragraph.)
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