Europe was stricken with a series of bad weather events recently, including a tornado that touched down in Málaga in southern Spain on Tuesday.
One local managed to capture a video of the twister that careened across the area of Campillos, 80 kilometres outside of the city of Málaga. At one point, it took out an electricity pylon and caused a flash fire.
While the damage caused by the tornado is still being assessed, it’s known that it brought down trees and a power line, the Guardian reports.
The breathtaking tornado was followed by torrential rain and flooding in the area, which also plagued Madrid earlier this week.
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President of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, said that over 200 incidents have been dealt with by firefighters.
Spain’s state meteorological office, Aemet, reports that emergency services were called to 1,134 incidents between 4 and 9 p.m. on Monday night.
Parts of eastern Spain and the Balearic islands are bracing themselves for more bad weather after Madrid was pummelled with violent storms, hail and flash flooding.
Photographs were widely shared of people digging through mounds of hail in the streets of the touristy city.
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According to the publication, more than 9,300 bolts of lightning lit up the sky. Cars and garbage were carried away by floods that devastated the town of Arganda del Rey.
“No one was hurt and the interventions were relatively minor for a storm of this magnitude — removing branches from roads, floods in garages, basements or commercial premises,” a spokesman for emergency services told the Sun.
An eastern cold front has put the coastal towns of Valencia, Alicante, Murcia and the islands on orange alert, Aemet says.
“Things remain unclear, but we expect the isolated depression at high levels to continue its progress east, bringing rain and uncertainty to a large part of the peninsula and the Balearics,” Aemet said.
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“What happened yesterday is that the Madrid area, which bore the brunt of it, isn’t a region that’s very accustomed to these levels of precipitation,” Rubén del Campo, an Aemet spokesman, said.
Though Del Campo didn’t definitively say whether the freak weather patterns are due to climate change, he did warn about the changing patterns.
“It’s very difficult to say that what happened in Madrid yesterday was down to climate change,” he said. “But we are living in a situation where there’s no doubt that these higher temperatures mean there’s more water vapour in the atmosphere, and that’s the fuel that feeds the storms. That’s a fact.”
Earlier this month, a rare tornado swept through at 150 km/h, leaving destruction in the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
About CA$1.6-million of damage was caused in Petange, Luxembourg, when the roofs of over 100 homes were ripped off, Express reported at the time.
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