Cars piled on cars, a 102-year-old dead in her home: Spain's DANA deluge turns deadly

MADRID — A slow-moving Mediterranean storm turned deadly across eastern Spain on Friday, dumping near-record rainfall that swept cars through the streets of Madrigueras, killed a 102-year-old woman in her flooded home, and forced around 90 rescues. The town of Madrigueras, in Albacete province about 120 miles northwest of Alicante, was battered in the evening by a deluge that dropped some 140 litres of rain per square metre in just three hours. Streets turned into brown rivers within minutes; half a metre of water swallowed the town centre, ripping parked cars from the streets and piling them on top of each other. Desperate residents were filmed trapped on balconies watching their cars sweep away, one man clinging to his vehicle to avoid being dragged off by the current. Rescuers found the 102-year-old woman lifeless inside her ground-floor home, which had filled with more than three feet of floodwater. Emergency crews carried out around 90 other rescues through the afternoon and into the night, most of them people trapped inside flooded homes. Authorities received 108 flood-related emergency calls, the Guardia Civil sealed off every road into the town, and the region raised its emergency plan to the highest operational level. An ES-Alert was issued for the La Manchuela area. The culprit is a weather pattern the Spanish call a DANA — an isolated pool of cold air parked high above the warm Mediterranean Sea, dumping extreme rain hour after hour over the same ground. It struck far beyond one town. In Tarragona's Terres de l'Ebre, more than 200 litres per square metre fell overnight: Catalan firefighters rescued 19 people from their vehicles, around 2,000 homes lost power, and emergency phone alerts told 150,000 residents of Baix Ebre and Montsia to shelter in place. The shutdown spread along the coast. Rail operator Renfe suspended trains between Barcelona and Valencia and stopped the Tarragona-to-Tortosa line. More than 400,000 students stayed home across the Valencian Community. Spanish authorities issued an urgent red alert across the east coast, and forecasters warned of further thunderstorms and possible hail over already saturated ground on Saturday. The DANA is Spain's deadliest weather pattern — the same phenomenon behind catastrophic flooding in the Valencia region in recent years. Each autumn it returns to the same script: hours of stationary rain, towns built for a drier climate, and warnings that arrive as the water does. Madrigueras, a quiet agricultural town, had no flood defences scaled for 140 litres in three hours. The 90 rescues are a testament to the emergency crews; the dead woman in her own home is an indictment of everything else.