British woman dies in weekend Madeira floods

By Fiona Govan in Funchal and Lucy Cockcroft Published: 6:30AM GMT twenty-two February 2010

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Pamela Gaines, 50, from Garton on the Wolds, nearby Driffield in East Yorkshire, was between 42 people killed in the swell and compared landslides.

She had been travelling with her father George, 54, a association director, and dual British friends when their cab was swept afar by a swell from a distended stream on Saturday morning.

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Mr Gaines and the alternative couple, declared locally as Roger and Gillian Wilson, managed to shun the car and were treated with colour with colour with colour for injuries at a internal hospital.

But the bodies of Mrs Gaines and the motorist were recovered yesterday after being blank given Saturday.

As their 3 sons arrived on the Portuguese island last night, neighbours described them as "a poetic couple".

The dual British couples were holidaying together and had left their highway house in the collateral to stay overnight in a 19th-century converted estate fifteen mins expostulate from Funchal.

But as they left the city on a widen of highway next to the river, their car was swept off the tarmac and down the bank towards the sea in the misfortune floods on the island for a century.

A five-year-old internal child and his mom were killed at the same spot.

The 3 British survivors were treated with colour with colour with colour in sanatorium for their injuries. Mr Gaines and Mr Wilson were both liberated inside of hours but Mrs Wilson stays in the Nelio Mendonca Hospital with chest injuries.

A orator at the sanatorium pronounced her injuries are not life-threatening but they approaching to keep her for up to ten days. It treated with colour with colour with colour 120 casualties on Saturday.

The genocide fee rose yesterday. Hundreds of family groups have been left homeless. British tourists told of the "terrifying" swell of H2O and sand that ravaged Funchal.

As rescuers from mainland Portugal used excavators and unclothed hands to differentiate by the sand in poke of some-more victims, visitors to the customarily composed legal holiday island and cruise-ship end were in shock.

Tourists pronounced they had been cramped to their hotels during the storms and the issue when majority were left but H2O or electricity.

Malcolm and Marie Titchener, both 78, from West Chiltington in West Sussex, watched from the windows of their seafront hotel.

"The seas were huge and incited brownish-red with all the run-off and waste brought down with the rains," Mr Tichener said.

"Nothing would have prompted us to go out in continue similar to that," combined his wife. "But this afternoon when the object came out we saw what repairs had been finished and it was terrifying. Overturned cars are piled up in the streets and majority shops and even the executive marketplace are destroyed."

Authorities began the clean-up in Funchal, one of the majority exceedingly influenced areas, but yesterday were still attempting to reach removed communities cut off by the storms.

"We have teams operative opposite the south of the island," pronounced Pedro Barbosa, emissary head of Madeiras Civil Protection Force. "But we have usually only managed to transparent the roads to what we design is the area that has suffered the worst.

A Portuguese naval frigate was approaching last night.

"What we have asked for are poke dogs and dilettante scuba divers to assistance redeem for bodies," Mr Barbosa explained.