BARCELONA, Spain – Barcelona and its surrounding municipalities have experienced their rainiest Saturday in at least the last 20 years, according to data collected by the Catalan Meteorological Service, as torrential rains that began falling from mid-afternoon on Saturday over the Catalan coast, which is in a state of emergency due to the formation of a convective mesoscale system in the Mediterranean, left between 100 and 200 litres per square metre in the Barcelonès region by midnight on Sunday.
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Data published by Meteocat indicate that 190.8 litres accumulated in Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood, 170.3 in the Diagonal University Zone, the highest in 18 years, and 152 around the Badalona Museum, the highest in 21 years. In the case of Raval, 3.4 litres fell in a single minute and 36.1 in half an hour, figures that Meteocat says are almost double those recorded on 24 March 2017, when 95.4 litres fell in the neighbourhood. Meteocat noted that rainfall overnight remained strong and torrential in an extensive and persistent manner across Catalonia, with shower bands moving slowly towards the north of Catalonia and shifting from east to west, warning that hours of precipitation still lie ahead and that the accumulation of rain will be exceptional for both quantity and extent.
The Generalitat’s firefighters were working in the early hours of Sunday to rescue several people trapped in their cars at the accesses to a flooded roundabout in Granollers, according to emergency service sources, having been alerted at 5.10am after a strong downpour in the town caused streams to rise suddenly, leaving several people trapped in vehicles, some of them having climbed onto the roofs. The sources indicated that crews working in the area had not yet attended to any injured people. Firefighters also evacuated four members of a family living on the ground floor of a single-family home whose ceiling slab had collapsed due to water accumulation on the terrace, in the Pasaje de la Concepció in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat.
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At Sants railway station, images showed waterfalls pouring from the ceiling onto the platforms, and leaks also occurred at some hospitals, while the Mossos reported road closures including the C-32 at kilometre 61.5 due to flooding on the carriageway. Catalonia’s Civil Protection also sent a new Es-Alert to mobile phones in the Vallès Oriental, Maresme, Selva, Baix Empordà and Gironès regions on Sunday to remind residents of the need to respect mobility restrictions during the torrential rain episode, with residents receiving the alert shortly before 7am. The message warns that multiple incidents are ongoing and that torrential rain continues in many places along with rising river and stream flows, stressing the need to respect mobility restrictions until the extraordinary episode of intense rain ends, expected by 2pm on Sunday.
