MADRID (AP) — Flash floods caused by heavy rains in eastern Spain on Tuesday swept away everything in their path within minutes. With no time to react, people were trapped in vehicles, homes and businesses. Many died and thousands saw their livelihoods destroyed.

Three days later, the authorities 205 bodies recovered – 202 of them in the eastern region of Valencia alone, two in Castile-La Mancha and one in Andalusia – and continue to search for an unknown number of missing people.

With warnings of more rain on the way, people are clearing up the thick layers of mud that covered homes, streets and highways full of debris, while also facing power and water outages and shortages of some basic goods. Some of the vehicles that the water swept into piles or crashed into buildings still had bodies waiting to be identified.

Here are a few things you should know about Spain’s deadliest storm in living memory:

What happened?

The storms were concentrated in the basins of the Magro and Turia rivers, creating walls of water in the Poyo riverbed that flooded the river banks and surprised people in their everyday lives. Many came home from work on Tuesday evening.

In no time, the muddy water covered roads, railways and invaded homes and shops in villages on the southern outskirts of Valencia. Drivers whose vehicles were converted into boats had to take shelter on car roofs while residents tried to seek refuge on higher ground.

The downpour was breathtaking. Spain’s national weather service said it rained more in eight hours in the worst-hit town of Chiva than in the previous 20 months. called the flood “extraordinary.”

When the authorities sent them Cell phone warning They warned of the seriousness of the phenomenon and urged them to stay at home. Many were already on the move, working or in low-lying areas or garages under water. that became death traps.

Why did these massive flash floods occur?

Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections Man-made climate change. One is that warmer air stores and then releases more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream — the flow of air over land that moves weather systems around the globe — that produce extreme weather.

Climate scientists and meteorologists said the immediate cause of the flooding was a truncated, lower-pressure storm system that originated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. This system simply parked over the region and poured rain. This happens often enough that in Spain they call them DANAs, the Spanish acronym for the system, meteorologists said.

And then there is the unusually high temperature of the Mediterranean. In mid-August, it had the warmest surface temperature on record at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit), said Carola Koenig of the Center for Flood Risk and Resilience at Brunel University of London.

The extreme weather event came after Spain struggled with prolonged droughts in 2022 and 2023. That’s what experts say Drought and flood cycles are increasing with climate change.

Has this happened before?

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

Elderly people in Paiporta, the starting point of the tragedy, claim that Tuesday’s floods were three times as bad as those of 1957, which claimed at least 81 lives and were the worst in the history of the tourist eastern region. This episode led to the diversion of the Turia watercourse, which spared a large part of the city from these floods.

Valencia suffered two other major DANA events in the 1980s, one in 1982 with about 30 fatalities and another five years later that broke rainfall records.

This week’s flash floods are also Spain’s deadliest natural disaster in living memory, surpassing the flood that swept away a campsite on the Gallego River in Biescas in the northwest in August 1996, killing 87 people.

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Associated Press writer Seth Borenstein in Washington contributed to this report.