the scandal of a disaster foretold

The plunging ravine that bisects Chiva was a playground for Jonathan Mateo Pinazo as he grew up, a place whose steep slopes he slithered down to hunt for frogs at its base. For most of the year, the rocky channel was dry except for the odd shallow pool, but after heavy rain people would rush to its banks to watch it channel run-off water from the mountains safely through the town. Never did Mateo, now a 37-year old rural security officer, imagine it would become an agent of death.

On October 29, the rain in Chiva started falling after 6am. At 7.36am Spain’s state weather agency issued a “red alert” about intense precipitation in the wider Valencia region. But its warning barely registered. “It was just the usual thing that there are going to be storms,” said Mateo, an officer in the Guarda Rural force. “Nothing more.”

The rain came down hard as predicted, but by 11am it was stopping. Chiva’s rain gauge registered virtually nothing for three hours; it seemed the worst was over. At 11.48am, Carlos Mazón, the conservative head of the Valencia regional government, said the storm was moving north over less populated areas and would lose force. At around 2.45pm, Mazón would disappear into a three-hour lunch with journalist Maribel Vilaplana at a restaurant in the city of Valencia.

But videos were already circulating of streets submerged in floodwaters 40-50km west of Chiva in another branch of the same river basin. Officials at Aemet, the state weather agency, tried repeatedly to reach the Valencia government’s emergency co-ordination centre by phone, but without success. A central government account of the day recorded: “No sound. They hang up.”

Mateo and his wife Gemma Valero Martínez, 35, another Guarda Rural officer, were getting calls from herders they knew in the mountains. “They were telling us: ‘Guys, it’s coming down really hard up here. Be careful down there’.” In Chiva, the sky looked black. As Mazón was sitting down for lunch, the rain in Chiva started again, ramping up slowly, then maniacally.

At 4.26pm it set off a sensor alarm that pinged an automated message to the emergency co-ordination centre. In just eight hours the town was drenched with 491mm of rain — close to the amount it usually receives in an entire year. The same had been happening on higher ground. But the morning downpour meant the soil was saturated and could absorb no more. Water cascaded into the ravine’s upper reaches in unprecedented volumes.

As it crashed into Chiva, it tore down a bridge and started surging into residential streets at about 6.30pm. Night fell, then the power went out. The sense of terror was compounded by the fact people could not comprehend what was happening. The first call the security officers got was to check on a woman who they were told needed help bailing out water from her home. “We got there and saw that this was not about scooping out four buckets of water. The water on her road was a river,” Mateo said.

As it kept pouring in, the water turned the narrow passages and dead ends of centuries-old streets into dark swilling tanks. The officers waded and swam forward, evacuating people paralysed with shock. Cars and furniture bobbed in the water like lethal bath toys. An elderly woman who ignored advice to stay inside was knocked unconscious and drowned.

“We could never have imagined the violence of it,” said Valero. The water smashed open the doors of the San Juan Bautista church and tore off the facade of a woman’s house, leaving her sat on her bed exposed to the world. At one home abutting the ravine they found a man dangling over a precipice where his living room wall had once stood, his wife trying to tether him with a cable. “He was saying ‘Let me go. Let it take me. I can’t hold on any more’,” Valero said. They saved him, but the horror in Chiva was just the start of the water’s journey of destruction.

The Valencia region, which occupies a crook of south-east Spain, is the archetype of a Mediterranean flash flood zone. Its 800 metre high mountains form the headwaters of river basins that descend steeply to the sea, making the lag time between peak rainfall and peak flow in river channels unnervingly short.

“In Great Britain, the time it takes for the first drop of rain to get to the end of the river can be 48 hours. You see what’s coming two days in advance,” said Ramiro Martínez Costa, a civil engineer who has worked as consultant for the Valencia regional government. “Here, it takes just four hours.” That means emergency managers are too late if they are reacting to water levels in the ravines or even to actual rainfall. “Alert systems need to be based on rainfall predictions,” he said.

The disaster began with a phenomenon known as a “cold drop”, a collision between cold air and warm humid air from the Mediterranean Sea, which triggers the rapid formation of cumulonimbus rain clouds. Valencians learned about cold drops from their grandparents, because they were blamed for floods that killed 81 people in the region in 1957 and more than 30 in 1982.

In the days leading up to October 29, weather watchers saw patterns that reminded them of previous disasters. “We were all on alert that something big was coming,” said Toni Rubio, a meteorologist at the Climate Research Foundation. “But the decision makers who should have been alert, mainly in the regional administration, were not.”

The rain fell in a shorter time span than anyone had ever seen. And climate change played its part: the Mediterranean Sea recorded some of the highest daily temperatures on record over the summer, and the sea was cooling only slowly. More heat means more energy, which can only be released from the largely enclosed sea by evaporation. That water vapour then becomes the fuel for intense storms — a “petrol can” effect.

Félix Francés, a professor of hydrological engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, said the October floods were of a magnitude expected only once every 3,000-5,000 years. But as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent, such calculations need updating.

One factor made Valencia particularly vulnerable: the density of urbanisation on the coastal plains. The channel in Chiva feeds into the larger Poyo ravine, which winds its way through a teeming chain of towns around the Valencian capital, together home to nearly 500,000 people. The towns expanded in the 1960s and 1970s, then filled out in another burst of development in the 1990s and 2000s. Building boomed despite facts documented in Valencia’s official cartography: the towns were in recognised flood-prone areas.

Even though the Poyo ravine is dry most of the time, Francés carried out a study in 1988 that showed just how quickly water levels there could surge. Ten years later, his university was hired by the Valencian government to work on a flood action plan that analysed vulnerability in 278 flood zones. It put the Poyo area at number six in the danger ranking.

When the action plan was approved by the regional parliament in 2003, it imposed limits on new building in at-risk zones. But there were exceptions and enforcement was patchy. Only when Spain’s property bubble popped in 2008 did construction halt.

Iván Portugués, a geography professor at the University of Valencia, said the landscape had been “Americanised”, covered with an unbridled sprawl of shopping centres, industrial parks and apartment blocks. Farmland — a useful sponge for water — gave way to impermeable concrete and asphalt.

The developers’ jewel was the giant Bonaire mall, proudly billed as Valencia’s biggest shopping arcade when it opened in 2000. It was built in an area with a high probability of thigh-deep flooding every 25 years. “The technicians knew perfectly well that we live in a flood zone. We had studied it,” said Portugués. “But it was not enough to convince the institutions that construction had to stop.”

When they purchased a house last year in Paiporta, Vicente Alberola Baviera and his wife Manuela Martínez Vallés dreamt of creating the home where they would retire. They embarked on renovating the property in the centre of the town, which straddles the Poyo ravine, and when they started living there in mid-October they were thrilled with its kitchen island and interior courtyard.

Some 10 days later, the morning sky was marked by a soft unbroken blueness. Not a drop of rain would fall on the courtyard’s mottled grey tiles all day. So when neighbours started talking about water in the ravine, there seemed little reason to worry.

A single sensor measures the flow of water between Chiva and Paiporta, a device that belongs to the Júcar river basin authority. Water that hits it can arrive in Paiporta as little as 45 minutes later. The sensor had recorded a peak in volume at midday that day — striking but not menacing — and at about 4pm it registered the start of another rise.

Alberola, a 54-year old music teacher who was at home with his student son, had heard about the rain in the mountains but had no idea what it would mean for him. Since the Valencia government was barely communicating with citizens, he had no way of knowing that a basin monitoring system was sending a volley of automated email alerts to the emergency co-ordination centre, flagging the heavy rain feeding the ravine.

The regional government has not explained who received those alerts or how they reacted. But the basin authority, which is controlled by the central government, also has questions to answer: it has not explained why it was not more proactive in raising the alarm about actual water levels in the ravine.

At 5pm, Valencia’s emergency committee began its first meeting of that day. At 5.50pm, the Poyo sensor recorded a volume per second of 584 cubic metres, which is at least seven times the average of the Thames in west London before it becomes a tidal river. The water level was rising rapidly towards the channel’s capacity in Paiporta — 800 cubic metres.

The head of the river basin authority, Miguel Polo, took part in the emergency meeting via videoconference. But Mazón, Valencia’s president, later complained that he “said nothing” about the brutal surge. Mazón was not there himself because he was still at lunch.

After more than three hours at the El Ventorro restaurant, Mazón eventually emerged and called the mayor of another town, Cullera, just before 6.30pm. The mayor said: “He told me that in principle the worst was over and that we could be more or less at ease.” At that point the sensor registered 1,756 cubic metres per second, roughly double the volume of an eight-lane, 25 metre-long pool — and double the capacity of the channel in Paiporta.

The ravine there had already burst its banks, sending water gushing in every direction like a shockwave. Alberola rushed outside in response to neighbours’ yells, saw it heading towards his house, and quickly retreated. “I suddenly felt so hot,” he recalled. “I thought: this cannot be.”

A tsunami was on its way. At 6.55pm the ravine sensor registered 2,282 cubic metres per second, its last measurement before it was washed away. In a spreadsheet containing readings every five minutes, the next cells contain only the words “fallo, fallo, fallo”. Failure, failure, failure.

Alberola’s front door blasted open. “There was a boom and it was like one of those Marvel movies where the superhero rips the door right off,” he said. “We went from being dry to having the water up to our chests.” They evacuated upstairs, helpless in the face of a tide that would rise as high as 3 metres.

That night 223 people lost their lives. At least 46 of them were in Paiporta, which had the highest death toll of anywhere. Three people are still missing. At 8.11pm, when the Valencia authorities lit up mobile phones with an absurdly late warning against going outside, many had already perished. Valencia’s chief prosecutor this week called for Mazón to be placed under judicial investigation after several private legal complaints accused him of manslaughter and other crimes. Mázon, who has rebuffed calls to resign, suggested the prosecutor was politically motivated.

Nineteen Paiporta residents were swamped in their homes, unaware of the need to move up from the ground floor or unable to do so. Alberola could not see anything in the darkness outside, but he is haunted by the cries of horror from his neighbours. “People are drowning,” he heard. “Oh my God. That woman is dead.”

Cutting the risk of flash floods is not impossible. After the 1957 disaster, generalísimo Francisco Franco oversaw a vast engineering project to reroute the Turia river away from Valencia’s city centre. It is the reason why the capital was largely unscathed on October 29. But dictators do not have to consult stakeholders and such poured-concrete solutions are out of fashion today.

Still, Spain has not lacked modern proposals to stop the Poyo ravine flooding. But its slow-moving state has failed to implement them. The Júcar river basin authority put forward a risk reduction plan in 1994. Three of its four parts were blocked on environmental grounds, so it only stabilised the walls of the ravine from Paiporta to the coast — a job finished in 2005.

By then the basin authority had commissioned work on an alternative plan, which was authorised by the central government in 2009. It involved restoring forests to improve soil water absorption and building a “safety” channel to siphon water from the ravine to Franco’s rerouted river.

By the time it won environmental approval in 2011, Spain was heading into austerity. A new conservative government then shelved the plan. When the socialists returned to power in 2018, the environmental approval had expired. Pedro Sánchez’s government concluded a new plan was needed, but cost-benefit studies and new environmental demands at regional level threw up fresh obstacles. On the ground, nothing was done.

“It makes you angry,” said Francés, the hydrological engineer, who contributed to the original plan in the 2000s. “Every expert knew what needed to be done.” Martínez Costa, the civil engineer, led work on the same plan and said it would have significantly reduced the tragic toll in October. “In Spain in the 21st century, it is not acceptable that any flood, no matter how big, causes more than 200 deaths,” he said.

At ground zero, where traumatised residents now shudder at the sight of rain, Alberola and Martínez Vallés are steeling themselves for another home renovation. They are placing orders for new materials while still paying off loans for what they lost. The granite countertop of their kitchen island survived, but it has been permanently stained by orange sediment in the water.

Equally indelible is the stain the floods have left on political leaders, who on the day, and over the decades, failed to prevent a disaster that had been foretold. At a funeral mass for the victims last week, protesters lashed out at politicians of all stripes. Two days later, another body was discovered in Paiporta.

“People studied this 20 years ago, they saw this could happen and they came up with a project to prevent it,” said Martínez Vallés. “But no one paid attention. And now what the experts said was going to happen has happened. So you say geez, what now? Let’s see if they do something at last.”

Additional reporting by Steve Bernard, Sam Joiner, Carmen Muela and Irene de la Torre Arenas