Spain floods newest: Furious crowds toss mud at King Felipe as dying toll reaches 217 in crisis-hit Valencia

Rainstorms started on Tuesday (29 October) and continued into Wednesday. In the aftermath of the floods, cars have been piled on the street surrounded by a sea of debris from damaged buildings and structures.

Here is the latest on the situation in Spain and what you need to know about travel.

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The deadly floods left cars piled up like toys in streets, swallowed homes, and covered entire neighbourhoods in sludge and debris. Muddy rivers swept away everything in their path – roads, houses and key infrastructure.

Thousands of people are still facing power and water cuts and shortages of basic goods, especially in the eastern region, the worst affected.

Here’s all we know about the devastating floods, the causes, and the scale of the impact:

Five days after devastating floods struck eastern Spain, many residents still lack access to basic necessities like drinking water, while internet and mobile phone coverage remain unreliable.

Power was only restored for most people on Saturday as thousands continued to clean up in the absence of electricity.

The burden of clearing the mud and wreckage has largely fallen on residents and volunteers, who continue to dig through the layers of devastation.

In Paiporta, a town of 30,000, city blocks are choked with debris, ruined cars, and layers of mud. Stores and supermarkets lie in ruins, and thousands have been left homeless, their homes ravaged by waves of sludge.

Anger is mounting among residents, who criticise the government’s response as too slow and poorly managed.

One flashpoint of frustration was the delayed emergency alert sent to mobile phones, which came two hours after the floods had already hit Paiporta.

“We have lost everything!” one resident shouted at the King yesterday.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has ordered 10,000 troops and police officers to be drafted to deal with the aftermath of the devastating Valencia floods.

The prime minister said it was his nation’s largest peacetime military deployment. Mr Sánchez said the government was mobilising all the resources at its disposal to deal with the “terrible tragedy”.

“There are still dozens of people looking for their loved ones and hundreds of households mourning the loss of a relative, a friend or a neighbour,” he said in a televised address on Saturday morning. “I want to express our deepest love to them and assure them that the government of Spain and the entire state, at all its different administrative levels, is with all of them.”

The deadly floods left cars piled up like toys in streets, swallowed homes, and covered entire neighbourhoods in sludge and debris.

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An expat teacher living south of Valencia in Spain says he is unable to leave his town due to being “surrounded by water” following flash flooding in the region.

John Fahy, 55, who lives in a seaside town called Cullera, also reported there being no food in the supermarkets, with no new supplies expected for a while.

“We can’t leave our town because it’s flooded all around,” he said.

“There’s no-one in the shops in Cullera because there’s no food and there won’t be for a while.”

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“It was known and nobody did anything to avoid it,” a young man told the king, who insisted on staying to talk to people despite the turmoil, while the prime minister Pedro Sanchez had quickly withdrawn.

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Spain’s Mediterranean coast is used to autumn storms that can cause flooding, but this episode was the most powerful flash flood event in recent memory.

Older people in Paiporta, at the epicenter of the tragedy, say Tuesday’s floods were three times as bad as those in 1957, which caused at least 81 deaths. That episode led to the diversion of the Turia watercourse, which meant that a large part of the town was spared of these floods.

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

The 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