ARCHIVED - Murcia floods, thousands of animals have died

The damage caused by the floods will cost millions to repair

As the flood waters recede the true extent of damage caused by torrential downpours in the Region of Murcia, Almería and Málaga can clearly be seen.

The worst affected municipalities within the Murcia region are Puerto Lumbreras and Lorca, which suffered rainfall of 212 and 141 litres per square metre respectively.

This volume of water falling cannot be absorbed by the dry earth and simply accumulates on the surface or starts to run downhill, rapidly gaining momentum and force as the volume increases.

Heavy autumn rains are a regular feature of the Spanish Autumn, and for this reason a network of smaller waterways known as barrancos criss cross the countryside, accompanied by man made waterways and ditches, which all feed into the ramblas, significant  waterways capable of absorbing millions of litres of silt laden water, much of which heads towards the coast and the sea.

For most of the year these dry waterbeds are simply an object of idle curiosity for visiting tourists who peer over town bridges into the vast dry chasms below, and only come into their own when rainfall floods off the surrounding countryside and converts them into lethal and powerful killers, which sweep away anything in their path.

But even the waterways cant cope when these volumes of water fall and minor flood channels overflow, spreading water across the countryside.

The areas worst effected by this rainfall are intensely agricultural. Gently sloping fields filled with melons, artichokes, broccoli and lettuce, dotted with olives and farmhouses, livestock exploitations farming sheep, pigs, goats and cattle.

In amongst the olive groves, modern chalets, weekend homes for the City dwellers of Lorca and families from nearby towns who live and work  in their flats during the week and enjoy weekends with their families on the land previously owned by their grandfathers.

A tidy place, quietly humming with farming activity and the drone of a working tractor, peppered with the barking of dogs and the clang of paella pans on wood fired barbeques beneath the grape arbours.

But today, everything within view was coated with a thick layer of muddy silt, and strewn with debris, fences and walls flattened, roads indistinguishable from the fields which had formerly held crops, but were now just a mass of slimy, blackened stumps, bales of straw and dead livestock piled against every immovable object.

The damage intensified as the fields ran gently down toward the barrancas, those at the top of the hill still green with the early crops of winter. As the slope ran faster, the volumes of water had increased and plants were plastered against the ground, sharply indicating the course of the water which had streamed over their bruised leaves, then as the pace gathered, just jagged stumps remained, tattered shards protruded like blackened glass, coated with clinging slime.

Then mud, just soft, sinking mud until immovable objects caught anything swept along by the waters, twisted sculptures of agricultural tubing wrapped around the base of olive trees, jammed tight with grass, straw, broccoli, clothing, melons torn from the fields like incongruous christmas baubles still perfect green globes amongst the tangled mass.

And still the water ran, hundreds of metres of accelerating power, gaining weight, gathering debris as it rolled across the fields, flattening wire fences and concrete block walls, ripping out street lights and tossing street signs against the olive trees, grabbing bales of straw and livestock, slamming them into the walls of houses and breaking anything which wasn´t firmly rooted into the ground.

Cars were swept up and overturned, bins unceremoniously dumped into ditches and roads ripped away as the barrancas grew fatter with the weight of water.

Such was the power of the water that on one roadside a plastic crate had been forced up through the tarmac and protruded amongst the broken slices of tarmac lifted from the surface by the force of the water pushing beneath the road.
Other road surfaces lay twisted in the fields where they had been dumped, and vast sections of agricultural concrete piping were 50 metres from their original position.

Some of these sections can only be lifted by a JCB, yet lay scattered across the fields like hundreds and thousands on a cupcake.

The local service railway line hung bravely in mid-air then just 50 metres down the line, gave up the fight and slumped in a dejected u-shape, the bridge spanning the line appearing to be pulling away from the ground, a straight crack in the tarmac across the road

And amongst the debris, dead livestock, thousands of sheep, pigs and cows have died in these floods, the un-named victims which will cost millions of euros to replace.

Farmers we spoke to today told of their neighbour who had lost 750 sheep, their cousin who had still not located his horses, the pig farmer whose entire stock was half buried in the mud and everyone they knew, themselves included, who had spent the morning mopping mud out of their homes.
Its no co-incidence that houses in this area are often elevated, on metre high plinths above the ground.

This has happened before.

It will cost millions to clean up this mess, which extended over dozens of kilometres, repair the roads, pay out for the damage caused to hundreds of houses, replace the thousands of kilometres of plastic agricultural tubing which are wrapped around trees, the heavy concrete pipes, the ripped out trees, the drowned animals, the wrecked cars and ruined crops.

Not to mention the irreplaceable loss of 10 lives. More people are unaccounted for, we were told today. There are roads still coated in mud which lead to isolated farmhouses, and until the water recedes and the ground has dried out enough for machinery to get into the sodden fields and start pulling out the debris, no-one knows what, or who, remains to be discovered, rolled in the mud.

And it was easy to see why people died. The roads and fields had merged into one flat, indistinguishable mass of moving water, a metre in depth in many places, and anyone trying to drive through the middle of it would have had no way of knowing where the road stopped and the water channels began. One wheel off the road, the car loses grip and is caught by the water, dragged towards the waterways, the only way to go being with the water until it was pinned against a wall or bridge, then enveloped in debris. 8 of the 10 deaths were people trying to drive through this mass of debris clogged water.

The Region of Murcia has declared three days of official mourning. The Minister for Development has visited and promised to ask for aid from the EU, the same thing that happened when the Lorca earthquake struck in May last year.

"We don´t know why we´re being punished like this", one lady said, standing with her family as they watched the water still pouring off their field of submerged broccoli, "two disasters in two years, but this is the one that will cost the money."

Many families are still waiting for the money promised after the May 11th earthquake last year, thousands are still in rented accommodation whilst homes are rebuilt or money paid across to finance a new one.

Tomorrow the water will be all but gone, and a massive clean up operation begin, the politicians and film crews will go as the next disaster strikes somewhere else.

And will people still get in their cars and drive across barrancas when the state has warned them not to.
Things like this only ever happen to someone else.....don´t they.