VALENCIA, Spain (AP) — Within minutes, flash floods from heavy rains in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in its path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

A week later, authorities recovered 218 bodies, 213 of them in the eastern Valencia region. Police, firefighters and troopers continued to search for an unknown number of missing people Tuesday.

In many of the 69 devastated towns, mostly located on the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia, people still face a shortage of basic goods. Water has returned to flowing through the pipes, but authorities say it is only for cleaning and is not suitable for drinking. Lines are forming at makeshift kitchens and food aid stands on streets still covered in mud and debris.

Thousands of volunteers are helping soldiers and police reinforcements with the mammoth task of cleaning up the mud and countless wrecked cars. At least 46,000 total vehicle insurance claims have been submitted, according to Spanish Economy Minister Carlos Cuerpo.

The ground floor of thousands of houses were destroyed. Inside some of the vehicles that the water washed away or trapped in underground garages, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

Frustration over the handling of the crisis boiled over on Sunday when a mob in hard-hit Paiporta hurled mud and other objects at Spain’s royal family, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and regional officials as they made their first visit to the epicenter of the damage caused by floods.

Another four people died in Castilla La Mancha and one in Andalusia.

Here are some things to know about Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory:

What happened?

The storms focused over the Magro and Turia river basins and in the Poyo channel produced walls of water that overflowed river banks, catching people off guard as they went about their daily lives late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

In the blink of an eye, muddy water covered roads and railways and entered homes and businesses in towns and villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia. Drivers were forced to take shelter on the roofs of their cars, while residents took refuge on higher ground.

Spain’s national weather service said in the hard-hit town of Chiva, more rain fell in eight hours than in the last 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary”. Other areas on the southern outskirts of Valencia received no rain before being wiped out by the wall of water that overflowed drainage channels.

When authorities sent alerts to cellphones warning of the severity of the flooding and asking people to stay at home, many were already on the roads, working or covered in water in low-lying areas or underground garages that have become death traps.

Why did these massive floods occur?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then sheds more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream – the river of air above the earth that moves weather systems around the globe – that generates extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding was called a low-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled current. This system simply parked over the region and rained. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANA, the Spanish acronym for system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean Sea. It had the warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Center for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain battled prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

“Climate change is killing, and now, unfortunately, we are seeing it first hand,” Sánchez said on Tuesday after announcing a 10.6 billion euro aid package for 78 municipalities.

Has this happened before?

Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the strongest flash flood event in recent memory.

Elders in Paiporta, at the epicenter of the tragedy, say the floods were three times worse than those in 1957, which left at least 81 dead. This episode led to the diversion of the Turia watercourse, which meant that a large part of the city was spared from these floods.

Valencia suffered two other major DANAs in the 1980s, one in 1982 with around 30 deaths and another five years later that broke rainfall records.

Flash floods also surpassed the flood that swept away a campsite along the Gallego River in Biescas, in the northeast, killing 87 people in August 1996.

What was the state’s response?

The management of the crisis is in the hands of the regional authorities of Valencia, who have asked the central government for help in mobilizing resources.

Some 15,000 soldiers, national police officers and Civil Guard gendarmes deployed to the area in the largest peacetime mobilization of military and security forces in Spain. Military trucks, heavy road equipment, Chinook helicopters and a Navy transport ship are helping to distribute relief aid, clean up and search for bodies.

When many of those affected said they felt abandoned by the authorities, a wave of volunteers arrived to help. Carrying brooms, shovels, water and basic food, hundreds of people walked several kilometers to deliver supplies and help clean up the worst-hit areas.

Valencia’s regional government has been heavily criticized for not sending flood warnings to cellphones until 8pm on Tuesday, when flooding had already started in some places and long after the national weather agency had issued a red alert indicating heavy rains.