Garages and tunnels, the unknown factor in the search for more victims of Spanish floods

The death toll from the historic flash floods in Spain continues to rise, five days later. The figure reached 215 on Monday morning after rescuers found an unidentified woman who was caught by the rising waters inside an underground parking in a shopping area in Sedaví, Valencia. The vast majority of fatalities (211) have been registered in the eastern region of Valencia; three more were recorded in Castilla-La Mancha and one in Málaga province, in the southern region of Andalusia.

It is precisely the flooded underground garages and tunnels that have become the top priority for search operations, as many people remain unaccounted for. Authorities have also started to warn the population about the risk of epidemics, most particularly tetanus, a bacterial infection that causes muscle spasms. The regional premier of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, on Monday urged residents in affected areas and people who have gone there to help, to get vaccinated “in the event of injury or bleeding during reconstruction work.”

Hundreds of personnel have been deployed in the province of Valencia, the hardest hit by the natural disaster, with instructions to focus on this task. Using heavy machinery, work is underway to drain two large car parks in shopping centers in the towns of Aldaia and Alfafar in search of more victims. But there are numerous garages in residential buildings and supermarkets where rescuers have not yet been able to enter.

After four days of pumping out water with their most powerful equipment, the Military Emergency Unit (UME) was on Sunday ready to enter the two underground floors of the enormous and destroyed car park of the Bonaire shopping center in the municipality of Aldaia (population 33,300). The parking has 5,700 spots, of which an estimated 2,800 are located in the two basement floors. Rumors circulating on social media about the existence of tens of hundreds of corpses in this parking lot have turned the search operation into a global trend on the platform X. Police sources said on Monday morning that 50 cars had already been inspected with drones, and that no bodies had been found so far. These sources also criticized the rumors circulating online.

In front of the parking lot of the Bonaire shopping center, there is no one officially giving out information, but all the firefighters on the ground are eager to deny the large number of hoaxes about the situation. “They were saying that there were 600 dead in here, imagine how distressed we were when we entered the parking lot yesterday,” says one of them, part of a team of volunteers from Logroño. “It’s true that we found baby strollers and it was all very gloomy, but for the moment there is nothing. We divided the search by sectors, we broke the windows of the vehicles, we felt the ground with sticks and we haven’t found any corpses.”

Sources from the UME military unit indicated that it is possible that the second underground floor was not operational at the time of the flooding, as it is only used on very important and busy dates such as Christmas. If so, there might not be any cars in there. But the social media interest in this particular spot has attracted numerous national and international media outlets, whose reporters were stationed for almost the entire day in one of the mall’s stores. On Sunday, two participants in the protest in Paiporta against a visit by Spanish officials spoke about “the silenced deaths” in Bonaire as a clear example of information manipulation by the authorities.

The second area that is in the spotlight is the car park of another neighboring shopping center, the MN4, located in the town of Alfafar. There, five pumping trucks and two trailers were working flat out on Sunday morning to extract millions of liters of water from a two-story car park with 1,600 spaces. In 48 hours they had managed to reduce the water level by one meter, explained a worker on the ground. By 6 p.m., the resources had been doubled and 12 pumping trucks and additional personnel from Málaga, Fuengirola and Marbella were at work. A fire brigade officer feared that the large amount of water they were pumping out and the new rainfall would collapse the sewerage system and delay the extraction work.

In Sedaví (population 10,600), workers were also pumping water out of a flooded car park in the center of town after receiving an alert that between 12 and 15 people might have been trapped inside their cars. “It seems that someone saw people go in but didn’t see them come out. At the moment we don’t know, it’s speculation, a remark that was passed on to us but until we get to the bottom of it, we won’t know for sure,” explained an officer from the Madrid Fire Department’s rescue team, José María González. Between 50 and 60 personnel, including firefighters, soldiers, civil guards and police, have been deployed to the site.

The garage, located next to the Town Hall building, has two basements and about 200 parking spaces. When the floodwaters began to cover the streets of the town on Tuesday, many citizens rushed without thinking to get their cars out of their garages, which became a death trap. The rescue team managed to empty 75% of the car park on the night of Saturday to Sunday. “We were able to reach the first level but we are still pumping water to get to the bottom of the garage. Fortunately, we have not found any victims yet, but there are a lot of cars there,” added the firefighter. “We hope that during the morning we can access the back of the garage and check if there are any people trapped,” he concluded.

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