Spain’s transportation ministry has declared a state of emergency and allocated €24.8m for emergency road repairs as the death toll from unprecedented downpours this week in the provinces of Valencia and Cuenca hit 205 on Friday afternoon.
Of that, €12.6m will go toward replacing the collapsed viaduct of the A-7 motorway in the Quart de Poblet municipality and to build a temporary three-lane detour around it.
Work has already begun on the detour, which the ministry said is “so important for metropolitan mobility in Valencia”.
The viaduct fell after what the ministry said was an “extraordinary increase” in the flow of a local waterway.
About a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours in parts of Valencia on Tuesday owing to a meteorological event known as a high-altitude isolated depression.
Since then, the two carriageways of the Valencia metropolitan area bypass have been out of service. The section is used by around 77,600 vehicles a day and it can’t be diverted to the regional or local network because they are also seriously damaged, the ministry said.
The other €12.2m will pay for rebuilding the N-322 highway near Requena and the N-330 in different sections in Valencia and Cuenca that were damaged by numerous overflowing riverbeds.
Experts have blamed global warming for this week’s catastrophic flash floods in Spain.
“We’re going to see more of these flash floods in the future,” Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, told Reuters.
“This has the fingerprints of climate change on it, these terribly heavy rainfalls, and these devastating floods.”
Spain’s transport minister Oscar Puente said about 80km of roads in the eastern region were seriously damaged or impassable, Reuters reports.
Many were blocked by abandoned cars, Puente said, adding: “Unfortunately there are dead bodies in some vehicles”.
Puente said it would take up to three weeks to re-establish the high-speed rail link between Valencia and Madrid.
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