Two people have been killed in Spain’s third named storm in a fortnight – with a fourth set to arrive on Thursday.
Storm Martinho is expected to bring more strong winds and heavy rain to much of the country, with widespread warnings from the nation’s forecaster Aemet. It comes after two people lost their lives in flooding caused by Storm Laurence earlier this week. Dozens of roads across Spain have been closed due to storm damage, with trains and flights also cancelled according to local news reports.
And it is not just the mainland that is affected; the Canary Islands government has advised residents against unnecessary travel ahead of fierce winds forecast in the archipelago.
The Canaries are under a yellow alert for powerful wind gusts of up to 43mph, less than a week after major flooding in Tenerife and Gran Canaria caused widespread damage. La Palma remains under a yellow alert for Thursday with gusty westerly winds.
Storm Martinho will bring more bad weather to close out the week, following storms Jana, Konrad and Laurence.
“A day of instability is expected across the Iberian Peninsula due to the passage of a front associated with Storm Martinho,” the weather bureau said.
Orange weather alerts have been issued for Asturias, Cantabria and Galicia primarily for strong winds across Thursday, with gusts of up to 68mph forecast for Asturias.
In Galicia, on the west coast, winds of up to 54mph are forecast with strong gusts, and sea swells of up to seven metres.
The bureau has also issued yellow weather warnings for large parts of the country for Thursday. Wind gusts of between 43mph and 55mph are expected particularly in the north west.
In the south, Aemet forecasts Storm Martinho will bring heavy rainfalls from Thursday, with some regions in the south around Seville expected to get up to 40mm of rainfall in a day.
Aemet said rain and thunderstorms will be “locally heavy and persistent” in the west of Andalucía on Thursday and through to Friday.
Dramatic footage of Storm Laurence shows cars being swept away in flood waters in Murcia with roads turned into rivers as the region was hit by torrential rain on Tuesday.
Video from Telemadrid showed vehicles piling up in a river while murky water ran through the streets as bad weather continues to lash Spain, with Barcelona forecast to get up to 100mm of rain on Wednesday.
In Águilas, nine people were rescued from vehicles according to local media reports after the storm hit the town on Tuesday morning. La Razón reported the coastal town got about 70 litres of rain per square metre in the space of an hour.
The mayor of Águilas, María del Carmen Moreno called for calm, La Razón reported her saying, “Losing a car doesn’t matter; losing a human life does”, as emergency services responded to more than 70 incidents across the region.
In Málaga, heavy rains and flooding forced hundreds of evacuations on Monday evening and dozens of rescues on Tuesday in particularly badly hit towns, El País reported, with rainfall of up to 100 litres per square metre recorded in parts of Andalusia.
Separately, emergency services in Seville have found the bodies of a man and a woman whose vehicle had been swept away in flooding on Tuesday, El País reports. The body of a man was found underneath the vehicle on Wednesday morning, while the woman’s body was found on Tuesday afternoon.
The body of a 70-year-old cyclist was also found on a riverbank after he went missing on Monday in Añora, and El País reported investigators were working to determine whether he was also killed by the storm.
A British family’s overseas home in Alicante, near Murcia, was hit by a tornado last week, flinging debris across the property and causing extensive damage, the Daily Mail reported.
