By Guillermo Martinez and Jon Nazca
CORDOBA, Feb 7 (Reuters) – Farmers in Spain warned on Saturday that torrential rains and high winds had left fields submerged and caused millions of euros worth of damage to crops, as Spain and Portugal braced for more extreme weather.
The Iberian Peninsula has already experienced a succession of storms in recent weeks, bringing heavy rain, thunder, snow and strong gales before the arrival of Storm Marta on Saturday.
A snowplow driver died on Saturday when his vehicle plunged 20 meters (65 ft) down a slope in the El Pico mountain pass, in Avila in northern Spain, where it had been snowing heavily, emergency services said.
Earlier the same day, a 46-year-old man drowned in a river at Campo Maior, in the central Portalegre area of Portugal, emergency services said on Saturday. Five people have been killed since Storm Leonardo’s arrival last week.
More than 11,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in Spain’s southern Andalusia region, while nearly 170 roads have been closed across Spain and rail services have been disrupted in Portugal.
Portugal’s agriculture ministry said on Friday that preliminary estimates put losses in the agricultural and forestry sectors at around 750 million euros ($890 million) because of the storms, which are expected to intensify in the coming days.
Spanish state weather agency AEMET warned on Saturday that Storm Marta would bring snow and hazardous coastal conditions, as well as more rain. Authorities issued an orange weather warning, the second highest after red.
The top-flight soccer match between Sevilla and Girona was postponed because of the bad weather, La Liga said, after a request by the Andalusian club.
Miguel Angel Perez, of the farmers organisation COAG in Andalusia’s Cadiz province, told Spanish television TVE on Saturday: “It is raining without stopping. Crops like broccoli, carrots and cauliflowers are under water. Thousands of hectares inundated. We have a real natural catastrophe.”
Perez said the storm had caused millions of euros of damage to this year’s crop and farmers would seek government help to recover.
GROUND TREMBLING, RIVER RISING
Waterlogging has also raised fears of structural shifts including landslides.
Residents of several towns in the Serranía de Ronda mountain range in Málaga, which had been battered by Storm Leonardo this week, said on Saturday the ground had trembled for days.
The council of one town in the area, Cortes de la Frontera, said in a post on social media on Saturday that there was “no danger” from the tremors which have also been felt in nearby towns of Benaoján, Gaucín and Jimera de Líbar.
Specialists from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) were deployed in the area to monitor the situation.
Several residential areas near the Guadalquivir River in Andalusia’s Cordoba province were evacuated on Friday due to the dramatic rise in water levels.
Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister María Jesús Montero warned that the river was expected to reach its peak level on Saturday or Sunday.
In Portugal, where the heavy rains have prompted three towns to postpone Sunday’s presidential vote till next week, more than 26,500 rescue workers have been deployed to cope with the impact of the storms.
($1 = 0.8463 euros)
(Reporting by Graham Keeley, Sergio Gonclaves; Editing by Aidan Lewis, Toby Chopra and Diane Craft)
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