Swollen Serpis River Roars Through Gandia After Record Rain

The Serpis river surged through the heart of Gandia on Monday morning, October 19, filling its channel from bank to bank after Storm Adam dumped historic rainfall on Spain’s eastern coast overnight. Local resident Stanisław Radomski filmed the muddy torrent from a bridge in the city at around 8:05 a.m., calling it a sight “never seen before, incredible.”

In the video, filmed at dawn in the light of the streetlamps, the thick brown water races beneath the bridge’s red handrail, swirling in strong currents and carrying clumps of reeds and broken branches downstream. On one side, rows of yellow and pink apartment buildings rise straight up from the retaining wall as the river rushes along its base. Looking downstream, the water churns into standing waves in the middle of the channel and splashes almost level with a lower riverside walkway, with an old multi-arch stone bridge in the distance. The empty bridge and the roar of the water fill the rest of the clip.

The Júcar river basin authority said the Serpis reached between 80 and 100 cubic meters per second at La Font d’en Carròs between 5 and 8 a.m., before dropping back to around 30 later in the day, while the nearby Vernissa hit 260 cubic meters per second, about seven times its normal flow. The Avamet weather network recorded 548 liters per square meter in Gandia by Monday morning, with 643 in Oliva, 693 in Pego and 720 in Forna. City services kept watch over the Serpis and the Beniopa ravine, and the river stayed high but within its banks in Gandia.

The regional government confined 145 municipalities, home to some 900,000 people, on Monday morning, and sent mobile alerts telling residents not to travel, before lifting the order in all but eight. Emergency services carried out more than 1,000 rescues across the region, and about 100,000 students had classes cancelled. Storm Adam has killed three people in the Valencia region, two in Oliva and one in Sagunto, and a fourth death was reported in Barcelona.