Torrential rain floods streets and halts rail in Bilbao and Barcelona

Torrential rain flooded streets in Bilbao and Barcelona on Saturday. Water reached knee level in parts of Bilbao's city centre within an hour, entered bars, garages and ground-floor premises in the Casco Viejo, and ran downhill with force on sloping streets. Shopkeepers boarded entrances; firefighters pumped out multiple premises. By 20.30, authorities recorded 150 weather-related incidents across Bizkaia, 137 in Bilbao, after more than 70 millimetres of rain in places. La Avanzada tunnels in Leioa closed. Similar incidents hit Getxo, Basauri, Laudio, Galdakao, Sestao and Erandio. Euskalmet kept an orange alert until midnight, then yellow until 06.00 Sunday. Gran Via and Tetuán in Barcelona turned into rivers of water. Barcelona activated its municipal flood emergency plan on October 3. Red alerts covered Barcelona and Girona until Sunday midday after Meteocat set all three precipitation thresholds to red at once, called unprecedented. Orange storm warnings said rainfall could exceed 90 litres per square metre in one hour and 200 in six. Eleven autonomous communities were under warnings. Òscar Puente called the rain "terrible." CONTESTED: Left-rated headlines call the floods deadly and describe cars floating through streets; the source record reports no fatalities or floating cars.