For Andrés Sánchez Barea, in Spain, it was the fear that arose when water started to spurt from plug sockets. For Nelson Duarte, in Portugal, it was the helplessness that hit as violent winds smacked down trees and tore tiles from roofs. For Amal Essuide, in Morocco, it was the reality that dawned when a corpse was pulled onboard 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 fired storm after storm at the western Mediterranean. Scientists do not know if climate breakdown helped pull the trigger, but research suggests it loaded the chamber with bigger bullets.
In Grazalema, Spain’s wettest town, a year’s-worth of rain fell in a fortnight and overloaded the karst aquifer beneath it. Water rushed into homes through floors, walls and even electricity sockets. Authorities ordered everyone to evacuate.
“I felt a lot of fear,” said Sánchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose home is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone. “At first we tried to get rid of the water. Lots of people came to help, but we realised it was impossible.”
In Leiria, one of four regions in Portugal where extreme rain broke records in January, powerful winds added to the damage. Monte Real airbase logged a top wind speed of 109mph (176km/h) before the station was hit and measurements stopped. Storm Kristin took out electricity, internet, and telephone service in the early hours of a morning that would soon turn deadly.
“It was around this time that everything seemed to be falling apart,” said Duarte, a beekeeper in Monte Real who lost half his hives. The house-rattling wind trapped him and his family indoors, where they could do nothing but avoid balconies and windows as they waited it out.
“The wind became deafening and relentless, mixed with the sound of collapsing structures, flying tiles, breaking trees and violently banging metal sheets,” Duarte said. “The atmosphere was terrifying and conveyed the feeling the house might not hold up.”
Duarte’s house held, but others’ did not. Ricardo Teodósio, an industrial painter in neighbouring Carvide, was fixing a garage roof with his father when it collapsed on them. Injured, the older man walked 1.8 miles to a fire station to get help for his son, who was trapped under the rubble. He was dead by the time they arrived.
João Lavos, the commander of the volunteer firefighters of Vieira de Leiria, said Teodósio was one of two people to die in the Carvide-Leiria region that day. In the space of 24 hours, the firefighters were deployed to 50 storm-related events, 15 of which involved victims of accidents. “It was an unprecedented situation that caused immense damage.”
Western Europe has been battered by 16 rapid-fire storms this season due to a shift in atmospheric currents that some scientists suggest will become more common as the planet heats up.
While the role that the climate crisis played in the formation of the storms is still uncertain, early analysis from Climate Central found it made a marine heatwave that supercharged the 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 sent for peer review, found carbon pollution made the rains stronger and the floods worse.
In Safi, the ceramics capital of Morocco, explosive mud waves shattered fragile pottery stores when rain swamped the souk at the end of last year. Most of the 43 people killed in storms across the country since mid-December died in the narrow, winding streets of its medina as water surged through.
“At first, we didn’t think there would be big damages,” said Essuide, who watched the chaos play out from the roof of the hotel she runs in the old town, and who was picked up by a rescue team. “But after we entered the small boat, and they found someone dead, then we realised it was a very hard thing. It was scary.”
Observational data show the most extreme rainfall days in Spain, Portugal and Morocco unleash one-third more water than they did in the 1950s, according to the WWA study, though climate models paint a more mixed picture. The researchers attributed an 11% increase in rain in the northern study region to global heating, but the effect on 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 the climate models. However, other lines of evidence do suggest that climate change has increased the amount of water available in that weather system to fall as rain.”
Last week, the EU’s official science advisers said Europe was failing to adapt to a hotter planet and the more extreme weather it brings. In Portugal, Duarte said emergency warnings failed to generate the necessary level of public alarm.
“Nobody was prepared for such a devastating force,” he said, adding that the death toll could have easily reached hundreds if the storm had struck during the day, rather than at night. “It caught us all completely by surprise.”
In Spain, meanwhile, people in Grazalema praised authorities for a timely evacuation. The centre-left leadership of the centre-left town came to a swift agreement with the centre-right authorities in Ronda, the town next door, which opened its doors to neighbours seeking shelter.
“They did the right thing,” said Mario Sánchez Coronel, who runs a textile shop 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 to never see such rains again.
“It was hard, because you think about what might happen next,” he said. “After the ‘bad’, will the ‘worst’ come?”
