Heavy rains in Barcelona disrupt rail service as troops search for more flood victims in Valencia

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Continuing storms in eastern Spain that led to massive flooding last week and killed at least 217 people, mostly near Valencia, dumped rain on Barcelona on Monday, prompting authorities to suspend commuter rail service.

Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, at the request of 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.

Puente said 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.

Classes were cancelled in Tarragona, a city in southern Catalonia about halfway between Barcelona and Valencia, after a red alert for rains was issued.

Meanwhile, in Valencia, the search continued for bodies inside houses and thousands of wrecked cars strewn in the streets, on highways, and in canals that channeled last week's floods into populated areas.

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.

The Bonaire shopping mall's 1,800 underground parking spaces quickly filled with water and mud on Tuesday and Wednesday when the southern outskirts of Valencia were hit by a tsunami-like flooding. The team is using four pumps to remove the water.

Citizens, volunteers and thousands of soldiers and police officers pressed on with their gargantuan clean-up effort to clear out mud and debris.

Many people feel abandoned by authorities, their anger erupting on Sunday when a crowd tossed mud at Spain's royal couple, the prime minister and regional leaders as they made their first visit to Paiporta, where over 60 people died and the survivors have lost their homes and still don't have drinking water.

Spain is used to autumn storms that can lead to flooding, but the latest ones have produced the deadliest flooding in living memory for Spaniards.

Climate scientists and meteorologists say the immediate cause of the flooding was a cut-off lower-pressure storm system that migrated from an unusually wavy and stalled jet stream. It was likely fueled by a record-hot Mediterranean Sea. That system simply parked itself over the region and unleashed a deluge.

The Spanish navy’s “Galicia” transport vessel arrived in Valencia’s port on Monday with marines, helicopters and trucks loaded with food and water to help with the relief effort, which included 7,500 soldiers and thousands of police reinforcements.