(Bloomberg) --Three days after flash floods swept through Utiel, a tiny town in the eastern province of Valencia, volunteers trudged through debris to help clear broken furniture and shovel away mud.
"In less than a day I've lost everything," said Carlos Hortelano, 57, who has lived in Utiel all his life. Storm water flooded his house while his mother and her helper were inside. They sheltered on the second floor, watching the water level creep up the stairs. In a single-story home next door, an elderly man died, having nowhere to go.
Utiel is one of more than a dozen towns in Valencia, the country's third most populated region, that were devastated by this week's storms. More than 200 people have died and thousands of homes were destroyed in Spain's worst natural disaster since 1962. Three of Valencia's five metropolitan train systems will have to be fully rebuilt and several large highways will need major repairs.
Extreme storms, known in Spain as "danas," are likely to become more common as climate change makes heat waves more frequent and intense. Record temperatures in the Mediterranean are strengthening the effects of such storms.
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Valencia's regional government has already pledged €250 million in direct aid for citizens, but it will take far more than that to undo the damage. The total amount needed is still unclear, but most of the support will come from government coffers: either from public works funds or a special insurance agency set up after Spain's civil war to fund reconstruction.
Recovery efforts will pose more than financial challenges. At a time in which Spanish politics is increasingly polarized, the administration of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will have to work closely with Valencia's regional government, led by conservative Carlos Mazon.
Political tensions are already apparent. Mazon has been criticized for his province's handling of emergency alerts, and Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the government's point person for relief efforts, blamed the region for waiting too long to notify residents. Valencia's emergency service sent out a warning at around 8 p.m. on Tuesday night — 13 hours after the national weather agency placed the area on red alert. At the time, many people were still out and about in the streets.
Mazon is also coming under fire for his decision last year to close a regional agency whose responsibilities included coordinating natural disaster response.
On Thursday, opposition leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo defended Mazon against charges that Valencia's alerts were fatally slow, noting that local governments rely on national agencies for information about the weather.
Mazon has been president of the Valencia region since July 2023, when the People's Party member rode a wave of support from the far-right Vox party to unseat a Socialist incumbent. He swiftly made his mark by cutting initiatives that he deemed ideological – including the emergency response unit. At the time, Mazon's government said more efficient systems could be developed.
Valencia is one of Spain's largest regions, but it ranks 12 out of 17 in per capita GDP. Its economy is highly reliant on low-income jobs such as agriculture and tourism, and the province is home to Benidorm, the sea resort credited with being the birthplace of mass tourism.
It's also known as one of the epicenters of the real estate bubble that ravaged the country's economy in the early part of this century. The scale of this week's destruction has been linked to years of unregulated construction and a lack of environmental planning or oversight.
The disaster happened at a moment in which Spain was on the upswing, with its economy growing far more than those of its peers. While economists say it's unlikely that the flooding could derail these gains, they caution that it's too soon to calculate the extent of the impact.
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"Sectors like agriculture and transport have been disproportionately affected," said Bloomberg Economics' Ana Andrade, "but the fact that the episode seems to have been so far limited to the region of Valencia — which accounts for 9% of Spain's GDP — will help to contain the costs nationally."
She speculated that in an extreme scenario, such as a prolonged blackout of the province's agricultural production and half of its transportation infrastructure, "the cost could be around 0.3% GDP in the fourth quarter."
In the meantime, with many people still trapped in their homes and the death toll continuing to climb, relief efforts remain underway. As many as 2,000 members of the army, the navy and the royal guard have been deployed to Valencia, said General Fernando Carrillo, who leads a special emergency military unit.
"I have never seen this degree of desolation," he said on public broadcaster La 1. "I want to send the message that we will reach every street, we will knock on every door and we will not leave here until everything is solved. We will be present as long as we are needed."
