Madeira’s a funny little place. I went here once on a cheap flight from London. It’s like a few mountains poking out of the Atlantic with hundreds of houses clinging to the sides. Unfortunately, the little island suffered from a fair bit of rain recently, and washed a fair bit of the island’s infrastructure into the sea.

This blog goes out to everyone there and here’s hoping the emergency services can rescue as many people as they can. Apparently they received 15 hours of rainfall, which resulted in a great deal of cars being washed down the roads and into the harbour.

A weird little place, there are just loads of pensioners on holiday there – one of the reasons, perhaps, why so many have died there; difficulty in avoiding the cascading waters. Airport is basically a concrete platform perched on the side of a cliff, supported by stilts. A scary place to land even when there isn’t torrential rain.