BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — A Spanish research vessel studying marine ecosystems has been abruptly diverted from its usual task to take on a new task: helping in the increasingly desperate search for those missing from the floods in Spain.

The 24 crew members aboard the Ramón Margalef were preparing Friday to use its sensors and submersible robot to map a 36-square-kilometer offshore area – the equivalent of more than 5,000 football fields – to see if they could locate vehicles that were hit last week. catastrophic floods washed into the Mediterranean Sea.

The hope is that a map of sunken vehicles could lead to the recovery of bodies. Nearly a hundred people have been officially declared missing, and authorities admit it is likely more are missing, in addition to the more than 200 reported dead.

Pablo Carrera, the marine biologist leading the mission, estimates that in 10 days his team will be able to transmit useful information to the police and rescue services. Without a map, he said it would be virtually impossible for police to carry out an effective and systematic recovery operation to reach vehicles that ended up on the seabed.

“It would be like finding a needle in a haystack,” Carrera told The Associated Press by telephone.

A lot cars have become death traps when tsunami-like floods struck on October 29.

The boat will join a broader effort by police and soldiers who have extended their search for bodies and missing people beyond devastated towns and streets. Researchers used poles to probe layers of mud while sniffer dogs tried to find scent trails of bodies buried in canal banks and fields. They are also interested in the beaches along the coast.

The first area that Ramón Margalef searches for is the maritime area off the Albufera wetlands, where at least part of the water ended up after tearing apart villages and the southern outskirts of the city of Valencia.

Spanish public television announced Friday that the body of a woman had been found on the beach after she disappeared when stormy waters swept through her town of Pedralba, about an hour’s drive from the coast.

Carrera, 60, heads the fleet of research vessels run by the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, a government-funded science center under the umbrella of Spain’s National Research Council.

He boarded the Ramón Margalef in Alicante, located on the Spanish coast, from where he will set sail to reach the waters of Valencia before dawn on Saturday. The plan is to go straight to work with the 10 scientists and technicians and 14 sailors who work continuously as a team. The boat also helped study the impact of the lava flow that reached the sea from the La Palma Volcano 2021 eruption in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Finding a body at sea, Carrera said, is highly unlikely. So the focus is on large objects that shouldn’t be there.

The boat’s submersible robot, equipped with cameras, can dive up to 60 meters deep to try to identify cars. Ideally, they will attempt to locate license plates, although visibility could be extremely limited and cars could be broken into pieces or swallowed in mud, Carrera said.

In the longer term, he said his team would also assess the impact of flood runoff on the marine ecosystem.

These results will contribute to the initiatives of other Spanish research centers aimed at studying the the deadliest floods of the century.

Spain is used to occasional deadly floods caused by autumn storms. But the drought that has hit the country for two years and record temperatures contributed to amplifying these floodssay the scientists.

Spain’s weather agency said the 30.4 inches of rain that fell in one hour in the Valencian city of Turis is an all-time national record.

“We have never seen a fall storm of this intensity,” Carrera said. “We can’t stop climate change, so we must prepare for its effects. »