Don and Terri Turner, who moved to Spain 10 years ago, were last seen on Oct. 29 before they were found on Nov. 2
A missing British couple have been found dead in their car amid the devastating flooding throughout Spain.
According to the BBC, Don, 78, and Terri Turner, 74, were last seen in Pedralba on Tuesday, Oct. 29, before torrential rain made landfall in Valencia, Spain, and continued through Wednesday. The Guardian and The Independent also reported on the couple being found dead.
They were found on Saturday, Nov. 2, after telling neighbors they were stepping out to fill their car with gas. Their daughter, Ruth O’Loughlin, hoped her parents could stay safe amid the conditions.
“We held out hope that they were still alive and maybe sheltering somewhere,” she told the BBC. “We talked about mum and dad coming over here next year to spend some time with us and we just ended the call and I’m really glad I said ‘I love you’ and she said she loves me too.”
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Her sister, Renee Turner, spoke to their dad on Monday, Oct. 28, and expected to hear back the following day. “Sometimes that’s not unusual, we can go a day or so without messaging every five minutes,” she told the BBC.
Don and Terri’s friends had called O’Loughlin to tell her of her parents’ deaths. “He said ‘Ruth, get your husband,’ 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,” O’Loughlin recalled her parents’ friends saying.
“We still don’t know exactly what happened to them. The only thing we’ve got from this is that they were together. It’s not the way you want your parents to go.”
The couple moved there from Staffordshire 10 years prior because they “always wanted to live in the sunshine.”
“They were together. They had great friends there,” O’Loughlin told the BBC. “We got comfort in knowing that they made friends everywhere they went.”
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Reuters and the BBC reported that a year’s worth of rainfall hit the ground over eight hours, causing Spain’s deadliest flood in three decades. The rainfall hit southern and eastern Spain, from Malaga to Valencia, according to the Associated Press.
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Spanish authorities have recovered 217 bodies as of Monday, Nov. 4, reports the Associated Press. The stormwaters overflowed the Magro and Turia river basins and the Poyo riverbed, the AP reports, leading to the riverbanks overflowing.
The water has washed away roads and railways, flooding homes and businesses, leaving people standing on car roofs or searching for higher ground in buildings.
“We are facing a very difficult situation,” Spain’s minister of territory policies, Ángel Víctor Torres, said, via PBS. “The fact that we can’t give a number of the missing persons indicates the magnitude of the tragedy.”
