The rain in Spain (revisited)
When I wrote a whimsical piece on this topic on the 26th of August I had no idea that, in October, rains would bring devastation to the Costa Blanca—or the part of it where I live. Storms and floods destroyed cars, brought down a bridge, savaged buildings and wrecked entire beaches. The precipitation may have been as high as 400 litres per square metre, in 24 hours. The area was officially declared a disaster zone, the Vice-President came to see the damage, and for days the rains were the main item of news on Spanish TV.
A friend of mine had to swim out of the ground-floor of his apartment block into his garage, where he found his car submerged in water. It had been a new car; it was now a complete write-off.
For some really revealing photos, have a look at the webshots.com album put together by Chris Young (from which I have borrowed my tiny thumbnail).
And where was I while all this rain was falling? In Manchester. (Yes, the irony is a little oppressive.)
However, I did get the start of it. It had been bucketing down all night when I got up on Friday to go to the airport. Since I was staying for a while, I’d decided to go by coach, and had ordered a taxi. It never came. When I telephoned, the dispatcher said it was impossible for a taxi to get to my urbanisation, because of the water.
So I drove myself. I got soaked from head to foot retrieving my car from where I had meant to leave it. Stepping into the road was stepping into a fast-flowing ankle-deep white-coffee-coloured river. My shoes and socks were no protection at all. My shirt stuck to my back, since water quickly found a way inside my jacket, in spite of my golf umbrella.
And then I drove through what were already substantial floods, praying that my car wouldn’t stop as the water swirled over the tires, and really not expecting to make it to the airport.
But I did. So I escaped the worst of it, just watching the news items on Sky TV’s one Spanish channel, and getting updates from my brother in Madrid. And telephone calls from Australia, where it appeared on their news.
I’ve been back for a week now. The floods have receded—but Calpe has become the Manchester of folklore. It rains every day, and when it’s not raining it’s overcast. There have only been a few hours of the warm sunlight we expatriates normally take for granted.
I’m not at all sure myself that human beings are playing a critical part in global warming. To me, it all smacks of the feeling children are supposed to have when their parents separate—that they themselves are responsible (when they are not). The changes may well be out of our control, the planet going its own way as it did for millions of years before humans arrived.
One thing is sure, however. Twenty-first century weather is going to be very different from twentieth-century weather. There will be droughts where it used to be rainy—and rain where there used to be droughts.