Flood fears of Spanish baker in UK for cake show

Professional baker Catalina Anghel said she feared she might become trapped in the UK

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 Anghel lives near Valencia where flash flooding has destroyed cars and left debris piling high in the streets.

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

“It is very difficult. I have a lot of friends in the flooded areas," Ms Anghel said.

"I have a friend, she lost everything. She was in the car when the flood arrived, she escaped by running, climbed on a tree, it's difficult to talk about."

Ms Anghel got one of the last trains out of Valencia on Thursday to fly to Birmingham for Cake International at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC).

She told BBC Radio WM her area was in a red alert and she was worried she would not be able to fly home on Sunday.

Flash flooding has destroyed cars and left debris piling high in the streets in Spain

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 the UK as the event was a huge one in the baking calendar and one she attended every year, Ms Anghel added.

"They have no food, no water, no power and they can’t leave their home," she said.

"They lost their car, their job, their everything. It's terrible. I don’t know when this will fixed."

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

"They are saying that now is devastated, everything and thanks God they are OK. It's hard, because from here I cannot do anything," she said.

There are fears the death toll could rise in the coming days as many people remain missing across the affected areas.

More than a year's worth of rain fell in the area over just eight hours on Tuesday.

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 an intensely unstable atmospheric environment.

While studies suggest 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.