BARCELONA, Spain — Flash floods in eastern Spain swept away cars, turned village streets into rivers, disrupted rail lines and highways and killed at least 72 people in the worst natural disaster to hit the European nation in recent memory.

Storms that started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday caused flooding in a wide area of ​​southern and eastern Spain, stretching from Malaga to Valencia. Muddy torrents tossed vehicles onto the streets at high speed, while chunks of wood swirled in the water alongside household items. Police and rescue services used helicopters to lift people from their homes and rubber boats to reach drivers stuck on the roofs of their cars.

Emergency services in the eastern region of Valencia confirmed a death toll of 70 on Wednesday. Two other victims were reported in the neighboring region of Castilla La Mancha.

“Yesterday was the worst day of my life,” Ricardo Gabaldón, the mayor of Utiel, a city in Valencia, told national broadcaster RTVE on Wednesday. He said six residents of his town had died and several others had not been found.

“We were caught like rats. Cars and garbage containers flowed through the streets. The water was rising to 3 meters (9.8 feet),” he said.

Searchers worked to find survivors and victims, with untold numbers still missing. Spain’s government has announced it will declare three days of mourning starting Thursday for those killed in the devastating floods.

“To those looking for their loved ones, all of Spain feels your pain,” Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said in a televised address. “Our priority is to help you. We are putting all the necessary resources to be able to recover from this tragedy.”

More than 1,600 soldiers from Spain’s emergency response units have been deployed to the devastated areas, and rescue personnel are traveling to affected areas across the country. Spain’s central government has set up a crisis committee to help coordinate rescue efforts.

The elderly were the most vulnerable. RTVE broadcast images of elderly people in chairs and wheelchairs with water up to their knees at a nursing home and a military unit rescuing an elderly couple from the top floor of their home in the bucket of a bulldozer.

Television reports showed videos shot by panicked residents documenting water flooding the ground floor of apartment buildings, streams bursting their banks and bridges giving way. People gasped as they pointed to what they feared might be bodies bobbing in the swift brown flood.

Spain’s national weather service called the rain “extraordinary” in parts of Valencia.

Spain has experimented similar autumn storms in recent years. Nothing, however, compared to the flood-like devastation of the past two days in Germany and Belgium in 2021 in which 230 people were killed.

The death toll is likely to rise with other regions yet to report casualties and search efforts continuing in hard-to-reach areas.

“We are facing a very difficult situation,” said Territorial Policy Minister Ángel Víctor Torres. “The fact that we cannot provide a number of missing persons indicates the scale of the tragedy.”

In the village of Letur in the neighboring Castilla La Mancha region, Mayor Sergio Marín Sánchez said five people were missing.

Spain is still recovering from a severe and record drought high temperatures in recent years. Scientists say increased episodes of extreme weather are probably related to climate change. The prolonged drought has also made it difficult for the land to absorb large volumes of water.

The storms unleashed a freak hailstorm that blew holes in car windows and greenhouses, as well as a rarely seen tornado.

Transport was also affected. A high-speed train with nearly 300 people on board derailed near Malaga, although rail authorities said no one was injured. High-speed train service between the city of Valencia and Madrid has been suspended, as have commuter lines. About 1,500 people stayed overnight at Valencia airport before their flights.

Valencia regional president Carlos Mazón urged people to stay at home, with road travel already difficult due to fallen trees and destroyed vehicles. Rescue efforts were hampered, Mazón said, by downed power lines that left areas without power, while phone lines were jammed with calls. He said the regional emergency service had attended to about 30,000 calls.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told reporters in Brussels that the EU would help by using its Copernicus satellite geomonitoring system “to help coordinate rescue teams”.

She said the bloc can activate a civil protection mechanism that provides combined assistance from the other 26 member countries if Spain needs help.

“Europe is ready to help,” Von der Leyen said.

As the waters receded, thick layers of mud mixed with garbage made the streets unrecognizable.

“The neighborhood is destroyed, all the cars are on top of each other, it’s basically destroyed,” Christian Viena, a bar owner in the Valencian village of Barrio de la Torre, said by phone. “Everything is a complete wreck, everything is ready to be thrown away. The mud is almost 30 centimeters (11 inches) deep.”

Outside the bar in Vienna, people were venturing out to see what they could salvage. Cars were piled up and the streets were littered with clumps of waterlogged branches.

Relatives of the missing flooded social media and local television and radio stations with appeals to find their loved ones.

Leonardo Enrique told RTVE that his family had been searching for hours for his son, Leonardo Enrique Rivera, 40, who was driving a delivery van when it started to rain. His son sent a message saying his van was flooded and that he had been hit by another vehicle when he was near Ribarroja, an industrial town that is one of the hardest hit, Enrique said.

Football matches for Valencia and neighboring club Levante were postponed.

Located south of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, Valencia is a tourist destination known for its beaches, citrus groves and the home of Spain’s paella rice dish.

Like other areas of Spain, Valencia has gorges and small riverbeds that spend much of the year completely dry, but quickly fill with water when it rains. Many of them pass through populated areas.

Rain eased in Valencia late Wednesday morning as the storm moved north, prompting authorities in the Barcelona region to issue weather alerts.

___

Medrano reported from Madrid. Associated Press reporter Lorne Cook in Brussels contributed.