VALENCIA: Spain will deploy 10,000 additional troops and police officers to the eastern Valencia region devastated by historic floods that have killed 211 people, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Saturday. Hopes of finding survivors, more than three days after torrents of muddy water submerged towns and wrecked infrastructure, were slim in the European country's deadliest disaster of this kind in decades.
Almost all the deaths have been recorded in the eastern Valencia region, where thousands of security and emergency services personnel are frantically clearing debris and mud in the search for bodies. Sanchez said in a televised address that the disaster was the second deadliest flood in Europe this century and announced a significant increase in security forces for relief efforts. The government had accepted the Valencia region leader's request for 5,000 additional troops and informed him of a further deployment of 5,000 police officers and civil guards, Sanchez said. Spain was conducting its largest deployment of army and security force personnel in peacetime, he added.
Authorities have come under scrutiny regarding the adequacy of warning systems before the floods, and some affected residents have complained that the response to the disaster has been too slow.
"I am aware the response is not enough; there are problems and severe shortages... towns buried by mud, desperate people searching for their relatives," Sanchez said. — AFP
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