Flooded cars piled up are pictured in Valencia, Spain, Thursday, Oct. 31, 2024. (Manu Fernandez/AP)

MADRID — Within minutes, floods caused by heavy rains in eastern Spain swept away almost everything in their path. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands of livelihoods were shattered.

Four days later, authorities recovered 213 bodies – most of them in the eastern region of Valencia. They continued to search for an unknown number of missing people on Saturday.

Thousands of volunteers were helping to clear the thick layers of mud and debris that still covered houses, streets and roads, all while facing 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 late Tuesday and early Wednesday .

In the blink of an eye, muddy water covered roads, 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 the hard-hit town of Chiva saw more rain in eight hours than it had in 20 months, calling the deluge “extraordinary”.

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.

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 Tuesday’s floods were three times worse than those in 1957, which left at least 81 dead. 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 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, classified as level two on a scale of three by the Valencian government, is in the hands of the regional authorities, who can ask the central government for help in mobilizing resources.

At the request of Valencian President Carlos Mazón of the conservative People’s Party, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced Saturday the deployment of 5,000 more soldiers to join rescue efforts, clean up debris and provide water and food.

The government will also send 5,000 more national police officers to the region, Sánchez said.

Around 2,000 soldiers from the Military Emergency Unit, the army’s first intervention force for natural disasters and humanitarian crises, are currently involved in the emergency work, as well as almost 2,500 Civil Guard gendarmes — who have rescued 4,500 people — and 1,800 by national policemen. officers.

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.

Sánchez’s government is set to approve a disaster declaration on Tuesday that will allow quick access to financial aid. Mazón announced additional economic assistance.

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

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