Birmingham Spanish baker fears flooding for cake show – BBC.com

A Spanish professional baker in England for a cake show says she fears she will return to her country to find her home destroyed.

Catalina Angel lives near Valencia, where flash floods destroyed cars and left debris piled high in the streets.

Authorities say at least 158 ​​people in the country have died including a British.

“It’s very difficult. I have a lot of friends in the flooded areas,” Ms Angel said.

“I have a friend, she lost everything. She was in the car when the downpour came, she ran away, climbed a tree, it’s hard to talk.”

Ms Angel took one of the last trains from Valencia on Thursday to fly to Birmingham for Cake International at the National Exhibition Center (NEC).

She told BBC Radio WM that her area was on red alert and she was worried she wouldn’t be able to get home on Sunday.

Her husband and son were still at home and everyone she knew was affected, she added.

But she felt she had to come to the UK as the event was huge in the baking calendar and she attended every year, Ms Angel added.

“They have no food, no water, no electricity and they can’t leave their home,” she said.

“They lost their car, their job, everything. It’s terrible. I don’t know when this is going to get better.”

Cayetana Belda Marti lives in Coventry but studies at university in Valencia and her brother and sister still live there.

“They say it’s devastated now, everything and thank God they’re fine. It’s hard because from now on I can’t do anything,” she said.

There are fears that the death toll could rise in the coming days as many people remain unaccounted for in the affected areas.

In just eight hours on Tuesday, the region received more than a year’s worth of rain.

The meteorologists believe the extreme weather is due in part to the Dana phenomenon – when a pool of cold air interacts with an area of ​​low pressure to create a highly unstable atmospheric environment.

Although studies show that Dana events occur many times each year in the western Mediterranean, the intensity of such rainfall events appears to be increasing due to climate change.