Sagunto cancels Friday 2 October classes because of the rain alert
Sagunto City Council extended its rain safety measures this Thursday and decided to cancel all morning classes on Friday, 2 October, while the rest of the restrictions stay in place until the alert ends.
The storm that began this Thursday afternoon, 1 October, will continue overnight, with a risk of large amounts of water building up quickly. Because of that, the council decided to cancel all morning classes on Friday, 2 October, with normal activity expected to resume in the afternoon. The other measures activated today, including the suspension of social, cultural and sports activities, the closure of municipal sports facilities, and the restriction on the use of parks and public spaces, stay in place until the alert ends, currently set for noon on Friday.
Sagunto mayor Darío Moreno said the council acted on a request from the regional emergency service 112 to act with maximum caution, since it was hard to predict exactly how the episode would unfold: heavy rain could fall in the morning, it might not rain in the municipality but water could still build up overnight, or rain could hit neighbouring towns without directly affecting Sagunto, as was already happening when the announcement was made. Faced with that uncertainty, the council chose to cancel classes rather than wait and see how the weather behaved.
Friday's suspension is not the first this week. According to Infobae on 1 October, the regional Education Department confirmed that Sagunto was one of around fifty municipalities in the Valencian Community that had already cancelled classes that same Thursday, with the closure ordered in the municipality from noon. Friday's measure therefore extends a decision the council had already taken a day earlier.
The scale of the episode shows in the figures recorded in the first hours at other points under the red alert. According to El Debate (a Spanish newspaper) on 1 October, the Castellón town of Eslida recorded 129.8 litres per square metre and Xodos 112.8, the highest figures of the alert's first wave, with so-called wet microbursts in several parts of Valencia province. The Avamet weather network described the rain as very irregular and very torrential, with 80 to 90 millimetres falling in just one hour in some towns.
The alert had already been running for more than a day. According to elperiodic.com on 30 September, it started at orange level, forecasting up to 50 litres per square metre in one hour and 160 in twelve hours, with possible hail and strong wind gusts; the escalation to red level came hours later, with even higher amounts.
Episodes of this scale are not unusual in the Valencian Community. In an earlier red alert, on 13 and 14 November 2024, the CECOPI (the regional emergency coordination centre) ordered the suspension of educational and sports activities and the closure of day centres, as well as restrictions on private traffic with exceptions for essential services and medical care, across 163 municipalities in Valencia province, and sent two ES-Alert messages to the affected population.
That system, ES-Alert, is the same one the regional government activates during the highest-risk episodes to warn mobile phones in the area directly. It works through Cell Broadcast technology, which sends the message to every phone connected to the masts in a specific area without needing phone numbers, and it has been mandatory in Spain since the 2022 General Telecommunications Law, which transposed a 2018 EU directive.
For anyone who wants to track the alert without waiting for an ES-Alert message, the regional government also offers the official app 'Avisos 1·1·2 Comunitat Valenciana', run by the regional Emergencies Department, which shows the real-time status of weather alerts anywhere in the region.
The suspension comes barely three weeks after the school year began: the 2026/2027 calendar in the Valencian Community started on 9 September and will not finish until 18 June 2027, making this Friday the first non-teaching day of the year for much of Sagunto's student population.
The council is asking residents not to let their guard down until the alert ends: to check road conditions before heading out, avoid any trip that is not essential overnight, and follow updates from the council itself, AEMET (Spain's national weather agency) and the 112 service as the night goes on.
According to Sagunto City Council, with additional data from the Generalitat Valenciana, the Community of Madrid, El Debate, elperiodic.com and Infobae.