A Month’s Rain in a Day: Climate Change Mismatches on Grim Display in Spain Flooding

It is called “a month’s worth of rain” because it is supposed to take a month to come down. In Spain this week, it took 24 hours.

“If (emergency services) have not arrived, it’s not due to a lack of means or predisposition, but a problem of access,” said Valencia’s regional leader Carlos Mazon, according to reporting from Reuters. At least 64 people have died in the area, making it the worst flooding to hit Spain in three decades. Entire towns and the roadways in and out of them have been inundated, making it “absolutely impossible” to reach them.

[Update: Soon after publication the official death toll rose to 72. Several people are still missing.]

Not so long ago, much of Central Europe was under water; then, pretty much everywhere was under water. The water, constantly these days, is in all the wrong places. It is a familiar refrain at this point, but: a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, and that moisture comes down sometimes. It comes down at rates that the things humans built aren’t prepared for; we engineered our lives for a pre-climate change world, and yet here we are.

That month’s worth of rain averaged across a wide area wasn’t even the worst of it — in some places much more fell. The village of Chiva, just west of Valencia, got 100 gallons of rain per square yard in eight hours. Spain’s meteorological agency said that’s about what the town could expect in an entire year.

A day, a month, a year. The water will fall in ways that don’t make sense to us, until we do something to stop it. More rain was expected in Spain on Wednesday.