MADRID (AP) — Within minutes, flooding from heavy rains in eastern Spain on Tuesday swept away everything in its path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands saw their livelihoods shattered.

Three days later, the authorities did recovered 205 bodies — 202 of them in the eastern Valencia region alone, two in Castilla La Mancha and one in Andalusia — and they continue to search for an unknown number of missing people.

With warnings of more rain on the way, people are cleaning up thick layers of mud that have covered houses, streets and highways littered with debris, all while dealing with power and water outages and a lack of basic goods. Inside some of the vehicles that were washed away in piles or crashed into buildings, there were still bodies waiting to be identified.

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 riverbed produced walls of water that overflowed riverbanks, catching people unawares as they went about their daily lives, many coming home from Tuesday evening service.

In the blink of an eye, muddy water covered roads, railways and entered homes and businesses in villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia. Drivers, with their vehicles turned into boats, had to take shelter on the roofs of their cars, while residents tried to take refuge on higher ground.

The rain was amazing. Spain’s national weather service said the hard-hit town of Chiva had received more rain in eight hours than it had in 20 months. calling the flood “extraordinary”.

When the authorities sent mobile phone alert warning of the seriousness of the phenomenon and asked them to stay at home, many were already on the roads, working or covered by water in low-lying areas or garages, which have become death traps.

Why did these massive floods occur?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections with 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 struggled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. Experts say drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

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, ground zero of the tragedy, say Tuesday’s floods were three times worse than those in 1957, which killed at least 81 and were the worst in the eastern tourist region’s history. This episode led to the diversion of the Turia water course, which meant that a large part of the city was spared from these floods.

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

This week’s flash floods are also Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory, surpassing the flood that swept away a campsite along the Gallego River in Biescas in the northwest, killing 87 people in August 1996.

Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.

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