MADRID, Spain – Water is forcing its way through the streets, rivers are overflowing and ravines are surging with enormous force, in some of the images left by Storm DANA Adam as it passes through southern Valencia and northern Alicante, where torrential rains have turned recent hours into a critical situation. Videos circulating on social media show the scale of a storm that is hitting the La Safor and Marina Alta regions especially hard, with historic rainfall already exceeding 700 litres per square metre in some places.
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One of the most worrying situations is in Els Poblets, Alicante, where the Girona river has overflowed and caused flooding in the municipality, with images shared by the Valencian Association of Meteorology showing the force with which the water advances through the streets, even sweeping away cars that were in the public road. In the nearby town of Beniarbeig, recordings show the river with an extraordinarily high flow. In Oliva, Valencia, the rainfall has also caused major flooding, with images showing completely flooded roads, with water covering the roadway and spreading across nearby land, after the municipality accumulated 635 litres per square metre in just over 24 hours, 440 of them falling between midnight and 8am on Monday. The seriousness of the situation has forced the mobilisation of Military Emergency Unit personnel, who have travelled from their Bétera base to collaborate in rescue work, while the Generalitat has requested a helicopter from the Fire Consortium to rescue people trapped in flooded areas that emergency services are struggling to reach.
In Forna, in the Alicante municipality of l’Atzúbia, the water descends with extraordinary force through the streets, forming veritable waterfalls in the areas with the greatest slope, with the town recording 718 litres per square metre in just over 24 hours, 550 of them falling in barely ten hours between 10pm on Sunday and 8am on Monday, figures that according to the meteorological association will go down in meteorological history. The storm has also hit Gandía in Valencia hard, with flooded streets and swollen watercourses captured in numerous videos shared on social media, especially alarming being the level reached by the Serpis river, while ravines such as Beniopa and Barx have also recorded major surges of water during the day. In Chiva, Valencia, the force of the water has also turned streets into veritable rivers, with images recorded overnight showing a current of muddy water advancing violently between buildings, completely occupying the roadway and dragging sediment in its path.
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Given the seriousness of the flooding, the Valencian Generalitat has sent two ES-Alert warnings to the population asking people to avoid travel and remain in their homes, with the State Meteorological Agency maintaining the red warning on the southern coast of Valencia and the northern coast of Alicante while emergency services attend to multiple rescues. The authorities insist on the need to stay away from rivers and ravines and to move to the upper floors of buildings if water enters homes.
