A British couple who had been missing nearly a week in the wake of the floods in Valencia were found dead in their car, their daughters said.
Don Turner, 78, and wife Terri, 74, had been missing since torrential downpours dropped up to a year’s worth of rain in eight hours on parts of Valencia last Tuesday. Friends said the couple had said they were “popping out” to get gas, and Don Turner had told daughter Renee Turner that he had promised to message the day after they spoke on Monday.
But they had been silence since.
The Turners had retired to Spain 10 years earlier because they had “always wanted to live in the sunshine,” their daughters told BBC News.
“We held out hope that they were still alive and maybe sheltering somewhere,” daughter Ruth O’Loughlin of Burntwood, Staffordshire, England, told BBC news.
Her parents’ friend broke the news on Saturday.
“He said, ‘Ruth, get your husband,’ ” O’Loughlin told BBC News. “I called my husband in and, he just said, ‘Martin, hold your wife,’ and said that they’d been found and they’d been found in their car.”
She and her sisters were planning to fly to Valencia once it was deemed safe, and hoped to learn more.
“We still don’t know exactly what happened to them,” O’Loughlin said. “The only thing we’ve got from this is that they were together. It’s not the way you want your parents to go.”
At least 217 people have died and more are missing in the eastern Spanish city on the Mediterranean after floods washed away roads, railways, homes and businesses in a matter of minutes.
More than 10,000 soldiers have been sent to help in the rescue efforts, and searches and cleanup are ongoing, even as more rain is forecast.
With News Wire Services
