A British woman has died after Storm Claudia tore through a Portuguese holiday camp while a major incident was declared in south Wales after “severe and widespread flooding”.
The unnamed 85-year-old was found dead in the wreckage of a campsite in Albufeira, in the southern Algarve region, on Saturday morning.
Officials said 28 people were injured, two seriously, at the campsite and a nearby hotel. Those injured were British, Portuguese and Spanish and aged between 6 and 85 years old.
We used to drive past that camp often enough – main road out of Albufeira. It’s also in the old riverbed which might not be quite the place in a storm. And boy, was it a storm – the airport closed for 90 minutes. I’d actually done though to the bus to the ‘plane and we were all called back.
Ho Hum.
There’s not really any such thing as an “old river bed” down here, Tim. It’s a Rio Seco. A dry river. And it may be dry for years but get sufficient rain & it ain’t. As they found out in Valencia. One gets to recognise them & treat them with respect. When they start to run they don’t start with trickle & build. You can get a 10ft high wall of water come down them. Stuff that’s grown in the bed upstream forms a temporary blockage, the water builds until it lets go and…
Why, when you’re in the mountains you keep your eye on those black clouds & what would be an easy path up the valley you ignore.
It takes getting used to, how much rain we can get down here. Up until last week we hadn’t had a drop since April. I have an inflatable jacuzzi on the terrace, summers. I’ve emptied it & was getting round to deflating & packing away for the winter. That got 6 inches deep in 40 minutes.
You’re not kidding… I remember 20-odd years ago when I was moored in Port Ginesta (not far from Barcelona) there was a torrential fall of rain during the night. Next morning I was astonished to watch the marina “work boat” chugging past every few minutes towing submerged speedboats and the like that had been sunk at their moorings. The same storm completely took out a chunk of the coast road and flooded the motorway cutting to a depth of about a metre. “Sunny Spain”.. 🙂
The rain in Spain falls mainly …
Dry riverbeds are dry…until they aren’t! No doubt the land was cheap when they set it up!
Yeah well.. The Algarve. A 3600 hole golf course with some towns scattered across it. The locals knew the land & used the bits could be used. The other bits they left alone with reason. Then the infestation hit it…
A British woman. As in singular. Disasters aren’t really news now, are they? We’ve gradually worked out all sorts of solutions to stop people dying, and well, when you get to a single 85 year old, we’re about done. Maybe should have got out of there when there was a weather warning at that age and found a hotel and watched Countdown.
4 people died on British roads yesterday (assuming the average). To you, this was a big deal…
Yeah, here in Yorkshire the rain was battering horizontally for 24 hours, so much that it was forcing its way through door and window fittings. So what, a normal autumn storm, put towels down, mop up afterwards just like last time. Of course, the soft southern tenants next door complained about the rainwater ingress.
Yeah, tents aren’t terribly stormproof. Hence the move to more solid accommodation amongst humans.
Pix show permanent structures.
Google Earth shows mixed use. Campsites and permanent structures – trailer homes on foundations, I presume.
Other structures around the 85-year-old British woman with no name’s place were untouched.
Spain is a beautiful country.
And so is Portugal.
You don’t have to live in it.
It’s strange how, with anywhere, you get accustomed to things & cease to notice them. Like I’ve I’ve become accustomed to having a kilometer high mountain at the end of the road. I s’pose I’d notice if someone stole it. Eventually.
3000-ish feet. We’d have called that a hill when I was a lad.
Hugh Grant would like a word with you….
I tend to regard it as a mountain because it goes up almost vertically. But sure, we have bigger ones. I did have a place that had Mulhacen at the bottom of the garden. That’s 3½ km. It’s not isolated bu the highest point of a range. We were down at 800 so it fills a considerable portion of the sky. But even then, one begins to forget it’s there very quickly.
Of course you do get the reverse effect. If I was back in the the UK, it’s flatness would dominate the landscape for a while.
I have been told that if it is more than 1000 feet high it may be called a mountain. In Spanish the cut-off height for the equivalents of “hill” and “mountain” may be different. I strongly suspect that the Tibetan language will not classify 1001 feet as a mountain (is there anywhere in Tibet which is lower than 1001 feet?)