Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, on request from civil protection officials.
Mobile phones in Barcelona screeched with an alert for “extreme and continued rainfall” on the southern outskirts of the city. The alert urged people to avoid any normally dry gorges or canals, according to AP.
Puente said that the rains had forced air traffic controllers to change the course of 15 flights operating at Barcelona’s airport, located on the southern flank of the city.
Several highways have been closed due to flooding.
Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said that authorities can still not give a reliable estimate of the missing. Spanish national television RTVE, however, has broadcast pleas for help by several desperate people whose loved ones are unaccounted for.
In the Aldaia municipality, some 50 soldiers, police and firefighters, some wearing wetsuits, searched in a huge shopping center’s underground parking lot for possible victims. They used a small boat and spotlights to move around in the huge structure with vehicles submerged in at least a meter of murky water.
Police spokesman Ricardo Gutiérrez told reporters that so far some 50 vehicles had been found and no bodies had been discovered there.
MA/PR
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