Rescue mission Swiss search dogs return from Spanish flood zone
The Swiss search dog team Redog returned from its mission in the Spanish flood zone in the Valencia region on Sunday. This was after "three days of intensive search work", as the organization announced via the online platform X.
24.11.2024, 16:51
SDA
Three search dogs with handlers, an operations manager and a technical tracking specialist with a search camera were deployed in Valencia. The dogs from Switzerland also tracked down buried victims. They alerted at four locations, said Redog spokeswoman Dagmar Wurzbacher on Sunday at the request of the Keystone-SDA news agency. The responsible Spanish authorities then took care of everything else.
Search dog teams from other organizations were also deployed on site and Redog worked together with them. These included a team from Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany and from the Netherlands.
Still missing
Redog was deployed at the invitation of the local authorities in the Valencia region. Three weeks after the devastating rainfall, landslides and flooding, people were still missing there. The latest count is seven.
More than 156 square kilometers of land were flooded by the heavy rainfall on 29 October, with around 190,000 people directly affected by the floods. At least 229 people died as a result of the floods. This makes it the worst flood disaster in Spain's modern history.
There were also fatalities in the neighboring regions of Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia. In some places, there was as much rain in a few hours as there usually is in a whole year.
The disaster caused a great deal of resentment due to the slow start of the aid. On November 9 - a week and a half after the storm - 130,000 people took to the streets in the regional capital of Valencia to demand the resignation of Valencia's regional president Carlos Mazón. On Thursday, he dismissed Salomé Pradas, the minister responsible for emergencies.
