Manuel Yerai, a farmer in southern Spain, watched helplessly on Monday night as hail the size of tennis balls ripped through the plastic sheeting covering his pepper plants, as Spain faced one of its most destructive rainfalls this year.
“My greenhouses look like they had been shot at,” Mr. Yerai, 40, said on Tuesday afternoon, speaking by phone from his farm in El Ejido, an agricultural region in Andalusia. Around him, he said, windows were shattered and cars were damaged. “The ground is full of sparrows,” he said, “dead on the sidewalks.”
Mr. Yerai is one of millions of people in southern and eastern Spain — including cities such as Valencia, Murcia and Malaga — hit by the immense deluge, which began in earnest on Monday night. In some areas, more than a month’s worth of rain fell in a day. In the region of Andalusia, it was four times the amount of rain that usually falls in all of October.
Spain’s meteorological agency said that between 150 and 200 liters per square meter, or roughly 40 to 50 gallons per square yard, fell in some areas over a two-hour period. And meteorologists expect the rains to continue until at least Thursday, if not through the weekend.
“These are huge amounts of rainfall,” said Rubén del Campo, a spokesman at the meteorological agency. He said that the amount of rainfall indicated “extreme danger,” and urged people to not travel unless it was strictly necessary.
Many Spaniards, who are used to heavy storms in the autumn, were still shocked by the amount of rainfall. They spent Tuesday sending one another videos of brown water coursing over fields, lapping at the bottoms of bridges and rushing between trees.
Cars were half-submerged or floating through the streets. Homes were flooded. Public transit was disrupted. (Trains were affected in Málaga, Antequera and other places. The subway in Valencia was also affected. A high-speed train traveling from Malaga to Madrid derailed near Alora, but no injuries were reported.) Some schools were closed in several areas, including Murcia, Málaga and neighboring Alora.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like this,” Mr. Yerai said. “My grandmother is 89 years old and has never seen anything like this.”
Emergency services have made daring rescues, and the situation is still evolving. Nieves Goicoechea, communications director for Spain’s Interior Ministry, declined to confirm if anyone was missing, saying she did not yet have concise numbers.
The intense rainfall in Spain is likely the result of a sudden cold drop, known in Spanish as a “gota fría.” The weather pattern is relatively common and is sometimes called a “DANA,” the acronym for “depresión aislada en niveles altos,” or isolated depression at high altitudes.
When cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea, it allows the hotter, moist air at the surface to rise quickly. That produces robust rain clouds. Then, the storm system pushes these moisture-rich clouds into Spain.
“These episodes have become more extreme in recent years, causing severe damage,” said Mar Gómez, a Spanish physicist and meteorologist.
That’s partly because warmer air can retain more water vapor, Mr. del Campo, of the meteorological agency, said, which means that when it rains, there is more to fall. The Mediterranean is also getting hotter, which is making such rainfalls more violent and more frequent. In August, the sea hit its highest ever recorded temperature.
“This is created by cold air interacting with a hotter surface, and the hotter surface is becoming hotter,” said Miriam Zaitegui Pérez, the Spanish director of the European Climate Foundation.
In 2019, a river in Valencia burst its banks after a cold drop, and many residents were evacuated. At least six people died in that storm, which was the worst in eastern Spain in 140 years, El País newspaper reported.
The phenomenon has also become more geographically spread, Mr. del Campo said. The rains caused by a cold drop no longer just hit the coast, but also cities like Madrid, “where it is not usual to have this type of abundant rainfall.”
For now, Mr. Yerai, the farmer, is assessing the damage. He has lost some of the investments that he made for his crops — green and red peppers bound primarily for northern European markets — and will have to move quickly to repair the greenhouses before winter. No one in his family was injured.
“We farmers have a similar philosophy to fishermen: We have to go out to work, keep moving on and do what we can to survive,” he said.
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