Cars were still piled up in a flooded underpass in Alfafar, a suburb outside the city of Valencia, as firefighters prepared to start the search and rescue operations on Saturday (November 2).

On Friday, the death toll from catastrophic floods rose to 205 people in Europe's worst weather disaster in five decades.

Officials said the death toll is likely to keep rising. It is already Spain's worst flood-related disaster in modern history and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.

With about 75,000 homes still without electricity, firefighters were siphoning petrol from cars that had been abandoned in the floods to power generators to get domestic supplies back on.

The number of deaths has prompted anger as well as grief in Spain, with some people accusing authorities of being poorly prepared and not having warned people soon enough about the dangers posed by the storm. - report from Reuters