For Andrés Sánchez Barea, in Spain, was the fear that arose when water began to come out of the plugs. For Nelson Duarte in Portugal, it was helplessness that struck him as violent winds toppled trees and ripped tiles from roofs. For Amal Essuide, in Morocco, it was the reality that emerged when a body was dragged aboard a boat in the flooded medina.
Each moment of horror is a fragment of the destruction wrought by an atmospheric machine gun that in recent weeks has unleashed storm after storm into the western Mediterranean. Scientists don’t know if climate change helped pull the trigger, but research suggests it loaded the chamber with larger bullets.
In Grazalema, the wettest city in Spain, a year’s worth of rain fell in a fortnight, overloading the karst aquifer below. Water entered homes through floors, walls and even electricity outlets. The authorities ordered everyone to evacuate.
“I felt very afraid,” said Sánchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose house is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone. “At first we tried to get rid of the water. Many people came to help, but we realized it was impossible.”
In Leiria, one of four regions in Portugal where extreme rainfall broke records in January, strong winds aggravated the damage. Monte Real Air Base recorded a maximum wind speed of 176 km/h (109 mph) before the station was reached and measurements were stopped. Storm Kristin knocked out power, internet and phone service in the early hours of a morning that would soon turn deadly.
“It was around this time that everything seemed to fall apart,” said Duarte, a beekeeper from Monte Real who lost half of his hives. The wind shaking the house trapped him and his family inside, where they could do nothing but avoid balconies and windows as they waited for it to pass.
“The wind became deafening and relentless, mixed with the sound of collapsing structures, flying roof tiles, breaking trees and violently hitting sheets of metal,” Duarte said. “The atmosphere was eerie and conveyed the feeling that the house might not hold up.”
Duarte’s house held out, but others’ did not. Ricardo Teodósio, an industrial painter from nearby Carvide, was fixing the roof of a garage with his father when it collapsed on top of them. Injured, the older man walked two miles to a fire station to seek help for his son, who was trapped under the rubble. He was dead when they arrived.
João Lavos, commander of the Vieira de Leiria volunteer firefighters, said Teodósio was one of two people who died in the Carvide-Leiria region that day. In 24 hours, firefighters participated in 50 storm-related events, 15 of which involved accident victims. “It was an unprecedented situation that caused immense damage.”
Western Europe has been hit by 16 fast-moving storms this season due to a change in atmospheric currents that some scientists suggest will become more common as the planet warms.
While the role the climate crisis played in shaping the storms remains uncertain, early analyzes by Climate Central found that it made a marine heat wave that supercharged storms in early February 10 times more likely. On Thursday, a study by World Weather Attribution (WWA), which uses established methods but has not yet been submitted for peer review, found that carbon pollution made rains heavier and flooding worse.
In Safi, Morocco’s ceramics capital, explosive waves of mud smashed fragile ceramic warehouses when rain flooded the souk late last year. Most of the 43 people who have died in storms across the country since mid-December died in the narrow, winding streets of its medina as water rushed through them.
“At first we didn’t think there would be any major damage,” said Essuide, who watched the chaos from the roof of the hotel she runs in the old town and was rescued by a rescue team. “But after we got into the little boat and they found someone dead, we realized it was a very difficult thing. It was scary.”
Observational data shows that the most extreme rainy days in Spain, Portugal and Morocco release a third more water than in the 1950s, according to the WWA study, although climate models paint a more mixed picture. The researchers attributed an 11% increase in rainfall in the northern study region to global warming, but the effect in the southern study region was too uncertain to quantify using probabilistic methods.
Clair Barnes, a scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study, said: “Trends in the region are mixed and are not represented by climate models. However, other lines of evidence suggest that climate change has increased the amount of water available in that climate system to fall as rain.”
Last week, the EU’s official scientific advisers said Europe was failing to adapt to a hotter planet and the more extreme climate it brings. In Portugal, Duarte said emergency warnings failed to generate the necessary level of public alarm.
“No one was prepared for such devastating force,” he said, adding that the death toll could easily have reached hundreds if the storm had hit during the day, rather than at night. “It took us all completely by surprise.”
Meanwhile, in Spain, people in Grazalema praised authorities for a timely evacuation. The city’s center-left leaders reached a quick agreement with the center-right authorities of Ronda, the neighboring city, which opened its doors to residents seeking refuge.
“They did the right thing,” said Mario Sánchez Coronel, who runs a textile store in Grazalema that flooded. “They acted under pressure and it’s not easy to act like that.”
In what Sánchez Coronel described as a “miracle,” his wool blanket factory suffered only minor flooding. He said he hoped he would never see rain like that again.
“It was difficult, because you think about what could happen next,” he said. “After the ‘bad’, will the ‘worst’ come?
