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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Neil Lancefield

'Do not travel': Barcelona airport flooded with red alert rain warning issued and UK flights delayed

Thousands of UK air passengers are suffering disruption after Barcelona airport was battered by storms.

British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair are among the airlines affected.

Aena, which owns and operates Barcelona airport, said 17 inbound flights were diverted to alternative airports, and around 50 departures were cancelled or severely delayed.

Water has entered some areas of the airport, including the public area of Terminal 1.The severe weather has also led to rail services being suspended and motorways being flooded.

A red alert "extreme danger" warning has been issued for Barcelona by the local government in Catalonia.

"Do not travel unless strictly necessary," it told people nearby.

EasyJet issued a message to passengers which stated: “We have been advised that customers are receiving information to warn against all but essential travel to and from Barcelona due to severe weather conditions.

“We are planning on operating our flights as normal, although delays are to be expected.”

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.

Divers from Civil Defence Villalbilla enter a residential parking searching for missing people (Getty Images)

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 centre’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 metre of murky water.

A crane removes a car (Getty Images)

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.

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