'Spain floods have trapped me in my home - a tornado struck on my way back from work'

A woman has revealed how the have left her stuck in her home tonight.

Paola Daza Uhia, a 39-year-old who lives in Silla, Valencia, told the she had to walk home from work through a tornado - and spoke of her ‘tense’ wait for her husband to get home as he drove through submerged motorways.

At least 95 people, , have died in eastern Spain after ‘unprecedented’ downpours swept across the region, with some areas seeing more than a year’s worth of rain fall in just 24 hours. For Paola, the storm put her through an agonising five-hour wait for her husband Alfredo to get home safe.

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She shared a terrifying video taken on his journey which showed vehicles, including an Amazon Prime van, piled up on the road after being swept away by the torrent.

Paola told the Mirror: “It was tense - my husband could not get home as he was trapped on the road, watching the water rise more and more. In the end, five hours later, he was able to access the town where we live by looking for a shortcut, but we cannot go out until the road is in order.”

She also told of her disastrous walk home from work amid gale-force winds sparked by a huge tornado in the nearby town of Carlet. "The thing is that we all knew about all this coming, but it was mandatory to go to work. Yesterday was the second day of rain, I had to walk all the way home through strong winds from the tornado," she said.

Before the storm struck shelves of local were left completely empty by people stocking up on supplies, sparking memories of the panic-buying which came immediately before the Covid pandemic.

The aftermath has also been a nerve-wracking time for Paola and her husband, who she said had tried to contact emergency services only to met with silence. She explained: "Everything is collapsed, no phone, no police. My husband tried to call but the emergency number 112 and it wasn’t working." The couple remained "locked down" all day on Wednesday and "will see tomorrow" if they are finally able to venture out.

As Spain recovers from the once-in-a-generation floods, concerns have been raised over the timing of alerts issued by authorities - and some have questioned whether more lives could have been saved if the alarm had been raised earlier. The Spanish civil protection agency, which responds to natural disasters, only issued an alert at 8:15pm on Tuesday night, but by this point severe damage had already been unleashed by floodwaters across multiple areas. One headline on the El Mundo newspaper said the "magnitude of the tragedy" had sparked "doubts about whether the population was warned too late".

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