Muddy Torrent Fills Ravine Wall to Wall as Storm Adam Lashes Spanish Coastal City

A fast-flowing torrent of muddy brown water filled the Beniopa ravine from wall to wall in the eastern Spanish city of Gandia on Monday morning, October 19, as Storm Adam dumped torrential rain on the south of the Valencia region.

The footage was filmed at 10:50 a.m. by local weather enthusiast meteomierder from the railing above the concrete channel. The swollen ravine rushes past a row of homes and parked cars, a half-submerged tree is pushed over by the current, and residents with umbrellas look on from the far bank and from a bridge upstream. “It’s carrying quite a lot of water here,” one onlooker can be heard saying.

The Beniopa ravine, which has burst its banks and flooded the city in past storms, was one of the most closely watched spots in the region overnight. Shortly after 11:30 p.m. on Sunday, local police went round the Beniopa neighborhood warning residents that the ravine could overflow, advising them to move to upper floors and saying evacuations would follow if needed. The city opened a sports hall to shelter anyone forced from their homes, and the Red Cross prepared 40 emergency places there at the request of the regional government.

City officials said a new flood park in the upper part of Gandia, finished before the summer at a cost of about 3 million euros in European funds, took in water diverted from the ravine and was almost full on Monday. It is designed to hold 36,000 cubic meters. The city’s environment director, Daniel Muñoz, said it had “helped reduce” the flow, after more than 600 liters per square meter of rain fell on the basins draining into the city in about 30 hours. By midday, Mayor José Manuel Prieto said the water level in the Beniopa ravine had “dropped a great deal” and that both it and the Serpis River were under control, though the river was still running high. He said rescue teams had mostly helped elderly people who could not leave their homes on their own in Beniopa and in the coastal areas of Venecia and Marenys.

Storm Adam, a cut-off low that hit eastern Spain and the Balearic Islands, kept the state weather agency’s red warning in place for parts of the Valencia region on Monday. Emergency services handled close to 800 incidents across the region, more than 20 roads were closed around Gandia, and city buses were cancelled. Two women died over the weekend in storm-related incidents in Barcelona and Sagunto.