Before and after photos show damage from floods in Spain

Satellite images show flooding stretching from Alzira towards Valencia.

This image from the US Landsat-8 satellite shows the landscape around Valencia on October 8, before the flash flood, and on October 30, after it hit.

For scale, it’s about 28 miles from the city of Alzira, shown at the bottom left of both images, to Valencia, shown at the top left.

Satellite images show the destruction of a highway in Spain.

Before-and-after satellite images captured by Maxar Technologies show widespread destruction throughout the province of Valencia. Here is a highway that was damaged by the floods.

As of Thursday, around 300 people remained cut off from rescue due to damaged roads, reported EFE – Spain’s state news agency.

Flash floods treated the cars like legos, piling on top of each other.

The Sedaví area of ​​Valencia is almost unrecognizable in these before and after flood images.

Floodwaters overturned cars on their sides, flooded highways, cut off major roads and damaged many homes. Some were forced to flee to their rooftops to await rescue.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said Thursday that the government had deployed more than 1,800 police officers, 750 civil guards and 200 soldiers to help with rescue and recovery efforts, EFE reported.

The muddy waters stained people, streets and buildings brown.

This bank is in Paiporta, south of the city of Valencia, where at least 62 people were killed by the floods, some of them elderly.

A ravine runs through the municipality of Paiporta. When the storm came in, the valley overflowed, flooding the entire central area where nursing homes and the elderly live, Spanish broadcaster RTVE reported.

The mayor of Paiporta, Maribel Albalat, told RTVE that they had not received a warning of the imminent danger and people were caught in an ambush by the floods.

It is the worst flooding Spain has seen in decades and people were not prepared.

The storm was caused by what’s called a cold front, when warm air rises rapidly to form large cumulonimbus clouds that can then unleash torrential downpours.

Sudden, catastrophic rain events are becoming more of a problem around the world as global temperatures rise, largely because warmer air holds more moisture.

In a phenomenon some scientists call “weather whiplash,” many parts of the planet are swinging violently between extreme drought and extreme flooding.

“You can really go to any continent, any season, and find something at this point,” Daniel Swain, a climate scientist who studies the phenomenon at the University of California, Los Angeles, told BI in January 2023 after powerful floods briefly break the drought in California.

Thousands have been rescued, but many more remain trapped.

The number of missing people remains unclear, EFE reported. That said, about 3,400 people have been saved.

As the planet warms over the coming decades, droughts and rain events are likely to become increasingly extreme.

This is one of the many reasons scientists have called for companies, countries and industries to drastically reduce their carbon emissions. If business continues as usual, research suggests there will be more floods like this in the future.