Last week I wrote a post about the 2025 California wildfires. This week’s post is about the 2024 Valencia floods. These are just two examples of increasingly frequent extreme weather events that affect people around the word. They also affect the language we speak, especially the metaphors we use to make sense of such events.
On 29 October 2024, torrential rainfall brought a year’s worth of water to parts of Valencia (Spain) in just eight hours. Streets turned into rivers. Cars tumbled through streets that became rivers of mud. At least 232 people died. The images that circulated globally were extraordinary: vehicles piled like dominoes, neighbourhoods buried in brown sludge, rescue workers wading through mud-coloured water.
Alongside these images, there was also language. Survivors, journalists, politicians, and commentators all tried to find the right words to make sense of what had happened. And those words, especially the metaphors they chose, the ways they framed the floods, matter more perhaps than one might think.
Rusi Jaspal and I recently published a study in the ecolinguistic journal Language & Ecology comparing the social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods with those of the devastating 2021 floods in Germany, which we had examined previously in Environmental Values. Here is a short blog post about what we found and why it matters for how Europe is (or is not) preparing for extreme weather.
Floods as monsters, killers, and thieves
The most pervasive way of talking about the Valencia floods was to give them agency through the use of metaphors and personifications: to treat them as something that acts, that chooses, stalks and traps people – quite similar to how people talk about wildfires.
Media coverage described the floods as sweeping away everything in their path, swallowing homes, tossing cars about like toys. The floodwaters “took away lots of dogs, lots of horses, they took away everything”, one construction worker told journalists. The floods were treated as agents, as thieves, monsters, killers.
One metaphor was particularly striking in both Spanish and English coverage, namely the idea of people being trapped, like prey. Homes and cars became “death traps”. People felt “trapped in a nightmare”. And in a phrase that appeared repeatedly, locals were described as “trapped like rats”. This type of language casts the floods as hunters and their victims as helpless quarry.
This is, in fact, a long-established way of talking about floods. Research on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2014 Balkan floods and the 2021 German floods all found strikingly similar patterns: floods as monsters, juggernauts, warriors. As one researcher put it, by demonising nature this way, we risk hiding the social and historical factors that contribute to disasters, including, above all, climate change.
Tsunami walls and the grammar of destruction
Alongside the monster metaphors, the Valencia floods were framed as other natural forces – again quite similar to the 2021 German floods. During the Spanish floods, the tsunami metaphor was especially common, partly because the flood occurred near the coast, but also because it evoked the combination of an immense wave and devastating aftermath. “It came like a wave, as if it were a tsunami”, one witness said. Another described a “tsunami of water, mud, reeds and dirt” entering their town. The aftermath, too, recalled the wreckage of a tsunami, with “survivors left to pick up the pieces”.
Related to tsunami was another metaphor: the “wall of water”. Walls of rushing water turned streets into death traps, produced rivers that ripped into homes, swept away cars and people. The metaphor emphasises height, solidity, and above all, impassability. You cannot climb a wall of water; you cannot push it back.
These metaphors share a grammar of destruction. They position nature as the active agent and people as passive and helpless recipients of its violence.
Mud: Metonymy of a disaster
One of the most important threads in coverage of both the 2024 Valencia and the 2021 German floods was mud.
When the water retreated, mud remained. It covered roads, buried homes, filled the ground floors of businesses. “There’s nothing left — just mud”, people said. Vast areas were described as swamped in brown sludge, muck that appeared “in the blink of an eye” and then refused to leave.
Mud in this coverage was not just a physical substance. It became a metonym, a shorthand for the entire disaster. Where polar bears have long served as the distant symbol of climate change, mud brings the crisis home in a more immediate and tangible way. It coats boots, seeps under doors, stains skin and precious possessions. Almost anyone can be affected by floods, and anyone who has been knows what mud means.
Cars, normally symbols of civilisation, became iconic symbols of destruction. Images of vehicles piled on top of each other, stacked like fallen dominoes, appeared again and again in both verbal and visual coverage. The cars that had tumbled through muddy rivers and been shoved together by floodwaters stood for modern civilisation caught off guard and of infrastructure overwhelmed by something it was not built to withstand.
When mud becomes political
Beyond the devastating aftermath of the floods for which mud became a metonym, mud also turned into a political metaphor.
During a visit to Valencia, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia were pelted with mud by grieving, furious protesters, an act that was both literal and deeply symbolic. The phrase “will the mud stick?” appeared in headlines, invoking both the physical substance and the political idiom of lasting reputational damage. Shovels and brooms, tools of community clean-up, became weapons of protest. Protestors wielded them against the police horses trying to disperse the crowds.
The same process had been visible in Germany in 2021, where politicians were accused of getting mired in dirty scandal while communities shovelled. As in that case, and as in the British floods of 2015, the Valencia disaster was quickly drawn into a highly polarised political environment. One headline in El País described a “far-right feeding frenzy in the swamp left behind by the Spanish flash floods” — exploiting the mud metonymy directly.
This politicisation is a recurring pattern. The immediate focus on the extreme force of the floods and their monstrous, irresistible power tends to produce feelings of helplessness and insecurity. When they meet institutional failure or slow political response, these feelings can transform into anger. The mud becomes the medium through which that anger is expressed.
A different kind of flood: A wave of volunteers
But not all the language of the Valencia floods was passive or despairing. Alongside the metaphors of destruction, something else was emerging in media coverage: a different use of flood and water imagery altogether.
Where the floods had “unleashed their fury”, the human response “unleashed a wave of solidarity”. Hundreds of volunteers arrived on foot, carrying water, shovels, and brooms. Social networks “channelled the needs of those affected”, repurposing the language of water into the language of community. An “impromptu army of volunteers” shovelled mud in Chiva for days, their mud-splattered boots and gloves becoming symbols of collective effort rather than collective suffering.
These are what researchers call “topic-triggered metaphors“: the flood vocabulary is retained but its direction is reversed. Instead of water doing things to people, people do things like water. Instead of destructive waves, there are waves of solidarity. Instead of overflowing rivers, there is an outpouring of support.
This inversion shifts the emotional register. The fear and helplessness evoked by floods as agents gives way to something more like hope and solidarity when floods become a metaphor for human agency. It is a subtle but significant shift and one that is underexplored in research on how extreme weather events are represented in the media.
Climate change and “the unimaginable”
What, then, of climate change itself? Was the Valencia disaster discussed as part of a broader pattern of anthropogenic warming?
To a degree, yes. Attribution scientists and climate communicators were quoted widely. Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, stated clearly: “This has the fingerprints of climate change on it.” Climate scientists estimated that the rainfall was around 12% heavier and twice as likely compared to pre-industrial conditions. The metaphor “climate change turbocharging extreme weather” appeared in headlines.
And yet, despite all of this, the people most affected described what happened as unimaginable. “I have lived here all my life. This had never happened and nobody could have imagined it would.” “People were caught unaware.” Even officials claimed surprise.
This pattern is not unique to Spain. After the German floods of 2021, which were the most devastating in Western Europe before Valencia, people there, too, said they could not have imagined it. Before that, the same was said of the 2002 Elbe floods, and the 1997 Oder floods. Every major flood brings surprise; every major flood is described as unprecedented, unforeseeable, “the unimaginable”.
There is something troubling about this. Floods are becoming more frequent and more intense. Attribution research now consistently links their severity to climate change. And yet the social representations that circulate in media coverage, in terms of floods as monstrous agents, as natural forces of incomprehensible power, as events that strike without warning, may be reinforcing the sense that such disasters are impossible to anticipate or prevent.
Why language matters
Our analysis found very little change between the social representations of the 2021 German floods and the 2024 Valencia floods. The metaphors were strikingly similar: malevolent agents, natural forces, mud, helplessness. The emotional register was largely the same: shock, fear, anger, grief. The framing of climate change as background fact rather than political call to action was also familiar.
There are glimmers of something different emerging though. The topic-triggered metaphors of community solidarity are new and hopeful. There was also some political acknowledgement of the climate emergency. The Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez spoke for example of preparing for “the climate emergency that is particularly affecting our beloved Mediterranean Sea”. This suggests at least a degree of political learning and a change in social representations.
But for the most part, the language of floods remains stuck. It continues to position extreme weather as something that happens to people rather than something that is, in part, caused by people and that can be mitigated by political choices and collective action.
That is a problem. If floods are monsters, we can only flee them or mourn their victims. If they are predictable consequences of a warming world, we can prepare for them, warn people in time, build differently, govern better.
The question for anyone interested in how language shapes responses to climate change is this: how do we talk about what people in Germany and Spain still call “the unimaginable” in a way that makes it imaginable enough to act on?
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Brigitte Nerlich is Emeritus Professor of Science, Language and Society at the University of Nottingham. Rusi Jaspal is Pro Vice-Chancellor (Research and Knowledge Exchange) and Professor of Psychology at the University of Brighton. Our paper, The destructive force of nature and the constructive force of community: Social representations of the 2024 Valencia floods, can be freely accessed in this issue of Language & Ecology. (We thank the editors of the journal for the speedy, efficient and thoughtful handling of this paper)
Image: Volunteers cleaning up in Benetússer, Alfafar and Catarroja by Pacopac, Wikimedia Commons
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