<\/p>\n
Spanish navy diver Alvaro Carrillo donned his wetsuit and prepared a speedboat to scour a normally picturesque lagoon made murky by a sea of debris \u2014 and potentially bodies.<\/p>\n
As rescuers painstakingly seek victims of Spain\u2019s deadliest floods in decades in inland towns and fields, Carrillo\u2019s team is shifting the hunt for the dozens of missing to the coast.<\/p>\n
The torrential downpours on October 29 \u2014 which in some places dumped a year\u2019s worth of rain in hours \u2014 have swept detritus towards estuaries and beaches.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Three bodies have been found on the usually idyllic beaches facing the Mediterranean Sea, according to Spanish media.<\/p>\n
The authorities \u2014 heavily criticised for their handling of the catastrophe and confusing information on the number of dead and missing \u2014 have neither confirmed nor denied the reports.<\/p>\n
But an emergency unit involved in the rescue told AFP on condition of anonymity that at least one body has been discovered in the sea.<\/p>\n
Carrillo and his 20-strong team set out at the crack of dawn on the Albufera lagoon in the eastern Valencia region that has suffered almost all the devastation and 219 deaths.<\/p>\n
The lagoon lies at the heart of a natural park where thousands of migratory birds shelter in the winter and restaurants serve paella to nature lovers who can explore its pristine waters by boat.<\/p>\n
But its 2,700 hectares (6,670 acres) of shallow fresh water were almost opaque when AFP visited after the floods dragged in cars, furniture and mounds of reeds.<\/p>\n
The poor visibility is the \u201ctrickiest\u201d part of the team\u2019s work, but they would keep going \u201cas long as the daylight allows\u201d, sub-lieutenant Carrillo, 26, told AFP.<\/p>\n
Spain has dispatched more boats to the coast and increased its diving teams sixfold, Javier Marcos, head of the army\u2019s emergencies unit, told reporters on Friday.<\/p>\n
Divers from the regional fire service and the Civil Guard were also taking part in the disaster zone, AFP journalists saw.<\/p>\n
Firefighters struggled to remove reeds that had jammed open a lock, allowing the lagoon\u2019s contents to drift into the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sad, but it makes complete sense that they\u2019re looking here,\u201d said Jose Torrent, a pensioner from Valencia who often strolls around the lagoon.<\/p>\n
The regional emergency committee overseeing the rescue said on Thursday that radars and special equipment were being used to chart the waters.<\/p>\n
To the east of Albufera lies the isolated El Saler beach, another popular beauty spot now buried under piles of reeds scattered by the raging tides.<\/p>\n
Local council workers hoisted a red flag to dissuade potential bathers from the beach, which like others in the region has been sealed off.<\/p>\n
But the lagoon often swells to match the rising water levels during storms and bears few physical scars compared with the scenes of desolation surrounding it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe only visible damage is in the fishermen\u2019s nets,\u201d said Gregorio Ortega, 66, pointing towards some stakes to which clung nets used to capture eels.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spanish navy diver Alvaro Carrillo donned his wetsuit and prepared a speedboat to scour a normally picturesque lagoon made murky by a sea of debris \u2014 and potentially bodies. As rescuers painstakingly seek victims of Spain\u2019s deadliest floods in decades in inland towns and fields, Carrillo\u2019s team is shifting the hunt for the dozens of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4568,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[940,3092,3417,3096,3097,1182,234,3095,3416,3414,2816,1200,3093,3088,3415,794,3094,3098],"class_list":["post-4567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international","tag-american","tag-characters","tag-coast","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-dont","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-flood","tag-grim","tag-missing","tag-moves","tag-native","tag-rephrase","tag-search","tag-spains","tag-speaker","tag-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4569,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4567\/revisions\/4569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}