PAIPORTA, Spain: The water was already knee-high on the ground floor of the hotel where Aitana Puchal had taken refuge when she received a text alert from the regional government of Valencia at 8 pm on October 29 warning people to shelter in place from severe flash floods. “We could have done with (the warning) about six hours earlier,” said the 23-year-old, who had fled with other local residents and guests to the first floor of the hotel near the town of Paiporta. “We were all calming down a little from the panic and drying our feet.”

Others were not so fortunate. Carlos Martinez, another Paiporta resident, told local television the flood alert came when he was stranded in a tree “seeing bodies floating past.” Dozens of inhabitants of flooded communities told Reuters that by the time they received the regional government’s alert, muddy water was already surrounding their cars, submerging streets of their towns and pouring into their homes.

After days of storm warnings from the national weather service since October 25, some municipalities and local institutions had raised the alarm much earlier. Valencia University had told its staff the day before not to come to work. Several town halls across the region of eastern Spain had suspended activities, shut down public facilities and told people to stay home. But the mixed messages and confusion cost lives, dozens of local residents and experts told Reuters. More than 220 people died and nearly 80 are still missing in what is the most deadly deluge in a single European country since 1967, when floods in Portugal killed around 500.

The national weather service AEMET had raised its threat level for heavy rains to a red alert at 7:36 am on October 29, following heavy rains in mountainous areas west of the city of Valencia from the early morning. In the 12 hours it took for the regional government’s shelter-in-place order to come through, waters running through the usually dry Poyo ravine - the epicenter of the flooding - had surged to more than three times the flow of Spain’s largest river, the Ebro.

As climate change exacerbates weather patterns along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, floods are becoming commonplace and some previous incidents have been deadly. But after at least five decades without a major catastrophe, many people in Valencia were unaware of the grave dangers posed by flash flooding or how to respond.

Puchal, the 23-year old who sought refuge in the hotel, said she had never received much information about the risks of floods. “At school, they gave talks about fires,” she said. “But not floods.” That, combined with poor coordination among regional and national authorities as well as political decisions taken years ago not to invest in waterways infrastructure, worsened the calamitous loss of life, seven experts consulted by Reuters said. “It was foreseeable that we would have catastrophic flooding here,” said Felix Frances, professor of hydraulic engineering and environment at Valencia Polytechnic University.

Deaths were recorded in 14 of the 24 towns that had already been identified in environment ministry reports as at high risk of flooding, a Reuters review found. Experts including hydraulic and civil engineers, geologists, urban planners and disaster relief specialists said successive failures - to conduct flood mitigation work on nearby rivers, better protect houses built on flood plains, educate people and warn residents quickly - added to the fatalities.

With better infrastructure, “those deaths would have been infinitely less,” said Luis Bañon, an engineer and professor of Transportation Engineering and Infrastructure at the University of Alicante. One central government source said they expect multiple judicial enquiries to examine decisions made and to attribute responsibility for the high death toll.

As more of the world’s population settles on flood plains, climate events become more extreme and Europe warms faster than the global average, what happened in Valencia underscores the need for strategic, coordinated measures to protect people in European cities, said Sergio Palencia, professor of urbanization in Valencia Polytechnic University. Frances said he had helped draw up a plan 17 years ago to build flood works for the Poyo ravine at a cost then of 150 million euros ($162 million). On November 5, a week after the floods, the national government earmarked 10.6 billion euros to help victims.

The plan Frances worked on expired in 2017 because “no work had been initiated,” Spain’s State Secretary for the Environment Hugo Moran told Reuters. The government had to start from scratch and some works are underway, he said. Frances said some people were so unaware of the risk they didn’t know, for example, that it would be unwise to go down to a basement “to save the car.” — Reuters