Never before has it rained with such intensity, for so many hours and in such a large and populated area as this past weekend in Catalonia. "There is no precedent on the coast of an episode like this," with Barcelona at the epicenter. These are the words of the president of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, about a downpour "with tropical characteristics", which left record figures - for the first time in history 213 liters per square meter fell in the center of the Catalan capital -, two fatalities, a missing person in the Pineda de Mar stream, a sudden flooding of the channels of several rivers and a landscape with significant material damage after the passage of the cyclone, in addition to 226 rescue actions by firefighters.
The victim from Tordera is a 75-year-old man who died from the fall of a wall due to the effects of the torrential rains that violently hit the community. The deceased from Montornès disappeared after going down to his private garage to look for the car and the Firefighters confirmed the fatal discovery of the victim after receiving the notification at 7:13 a.m. And in Pineda, a witness saw a young man fall into the river, although the firefighters did not find him yesterday after activating an extensive search device.
Tordera and Montornès were, precisely, two of the towns where it rained the most on the night from Saturday to Sunday. The first belongs to the Maresme region, a coastal area adjacent to Barcelona and its area that accumulates important population centers - such as Mataró or Vilassar de Mar which, with 288 liters per square meter, is where it rained the most - and a peculiar orography, with streams, torrents of water and many flood-prone areas.
The second, Montornès, is located on the outskirts of Granollers - where the most water fell in a short period of time: 68 liters in 30 minutes - and belongs to an industrial area, also very populated and only 20 kilometers from Barcelona. Right in Granollers there were distressing moments in the early hours of Saturday to Sunday, when firefighters had to rescue several people from flooded cars trapped in the Congost River as it passed through the town. The storm also caused significant damage in the area of the Rodalies Renfe station with the detachment of a slope next to a track. "At 5 in the morning the street was going down as if it were a real river, it was incredible, nothing more than a miracle happened, I had never seen it before," says Maria, a neighbor who has lived for 40 years on Sant Esteve Avenue in Granollers, just a stone's throw from one of the areas hardest hit by this episode of rain.
Pere, who works as a waiter in a restaurant in the Vilanova del Vallès area - next to Montornès - recounts the "odyssey" it was to return home after leaving work. "Everything was cut off, the whole town was a river, a colleague's car was washed away by the rain." "It was impossible, everything was full of water, fallen trees, stones."
And the trace of the storm was clearly visible from south to north, from Tarragona to Girona passing through the capital and municipalities such as L'Hospitalet or Cornellà, where the water caused serious flooding in the streets and businesses of neighborhoods such as Bellvitge, Sant Josep and Santa Eulàlia, all adjacent to Barcelona and densely populated. In total, thousands of urban incidents were recorded in Catalonia due to water entering homes, commercial premises, underground and private garages.
The sudden flooding of the riverbed was another of the big headaches during yesterday's day. Civil Protection sent two ES-Alerts due to the risk of overflowing the Besòs at around 9:00 a.m., and the Ridaura rivers (as they pass through Santa Cristina d'Aro) and Daró (in La Bisbal), and the latter two overflowed without any personal injury.
The final stretch of the Besòs river, which flows into the Mediterranean and serves as a natural border between Barcelona and Sant Adrià with Santa Coloma, carried a flow of 936 cubic meters per second with a height of 3.5 meters this Sunday as it passed through Santa Coloma, double the established maximum safety limit. In fact, it multiplied by 300 the water that was falling just 24 hours before the storm hit. Here, the rains "with tropical characteristics" this weekend have put to the test the canalization works carried out after the deadly flood of 1962, the largest hydrological disaster in Spain with more than 600 deaths. In Santa Cristina d'Aro, in Gerona, the flow of the Ridaura river exceeded 300 cubic meters per second, a volume that is equivalent to a return period of 100 years. The hydrological risk improved as the hours passed.
At the infrastructure level, the storm caused damage to bridges and roads, several points of the Barcelona Metro that were slowly reopening yesterday, stations such as Sants or Plaza de Catalunya and in different areas of the Rodalies network. In fact, work has been done in the last hours for this start of the week, although the Government does not rule out specific effects during today's day. Yesterday, the service worked in dribs and drabs.
