As rescue crews and residents of Valencia search through the mud, piles of cars and rubble for missing people, anger against state authorities abounds. The number of 95 dead is expected to grow even higher, approaching the worst flood disaster Spain has seen – the 87 victims of the 1996 Pyrenees floods. And in Spain, the blame game has begun for a disaster that might have been smaller in scale had it been managed differently. At the center of it all is Valencia’s governor, Carlos Mazón, as the main culprit for the absence of any prevention or rescue mechanism…
The outrage is directed at the local government of Valencia. This is because the local government has both the authority and the absolute responsibility to coordinate the emergency services in the affected areas. Instead of doing so, however, it sent a message via Spain’s 112 system at 8:12 p.m., eight hours after the flooding had begun and 10 hours after Spain’s national weather service, AEMET, issued an “extreme risk” warning.
“The scale of the tragedy raises doubts about whether the population was warned too late: The Public Protection sent out warnings when towns were already flooded,” a headline on the El Mundo newspaper’s website read. As the newspaper continued, “hundreds of people were trapped throughout the night from Tuesday to Wednesday in industrial areas and on roads because the streets were already cut off and access was cut off.”
Not that AEMET is being left out of the loop either. Spaniards on social media say meteorologists underestimated the phenomenon because they did not expect it to take on this scale and did not let the public know they were in extreme danger. Of course, as British university professor The Open, Dr. Kevin Collins, says, “although warnings were issued for southeastern Spain, the scale and intensity of the rainfall tells us that these warnings offer little scope for avoiding immediate catastrophic damage. To be effective, warnings require people to have ways of managing the immediacy of the crisis, but this particular event overwhelmed both existing rural and urban infrastructure and emergency services.”
And in the case of Valencia, as it turned out, there was no management plan. The 112 message that arrived when Valencia was “flooded” stated that “due to the heavy rainfall, all travel in the Valencia region should be avoided to prevent road collapse” and asked citizens to wait for further updates or call 112 in case of emergency. There was no new information, but there was no reaction either.
In any case, when the 112 message arrived, many were trapped in homes, businesses and on roads, and possibly many were already dead. The issue has also bothered the central government with an official from the Ministry of Ecological Transition stating that “by the time the Valencia authorities acted, the situation had already escalated significantly. It is the regional governments in Spain that operate the warning systems and have the power to send alerts to people’s mobile phones to restrict mobility when necessary… Why this significant delay in sending alert messages to mobile phones advising not to travel or go to workplaces? We don’t know.”
But that was not all. The survivors who had survived and were freezing on the roofs of the houses they had climbed onto had no way of communicating with rescue crews – or with their own people. The landline and mobile phone networks collapsed very early on Tuesday afternoon and all emergency calls were directed to 112, which also collapsed a few hours later. So residents who needed help quickly realized they were on their own. Rescue crews were nowhere to be found. Rescuers did not know where to go, and there was no way to get to the flooded areas. In some cases they had to save their own facilities from the flood, or wait for news of colleagues swept away by the waters. El Pais writes that Mazon explained that rescue efforts were hampered by the utter impossibility of reaching those in need. “Firefighters and local police were flanked by members of the military emergency unit (UME). Even the security forces faced challenges; the Civil Guard barracks in Paiporta spent the night anxiously awaiting news of two of its members missing.”
Mazon in the crosshairs
The president of Valencia’s government, Carlos Mazón, is the one on whom all fingers are pointed by those seeking responsibility for the deadly disaster that has plunged Spain into mourning. The conservative Mazón is accused by his political opponents, the media and citizens on social media that the first “job” he did when he was elected last year was to abolish the UVE, Valencia’s Emergency Unit, which was created by the previous local government to respond to climate disasters such as floods and fires.
To the extent that the issue took on, Mazón was forced to respond with a statement from the Valencia government. In it, it said, in no uncertain terms, that the UVE was abolished because “it was just another imaginary organisation, with zero firefighters, zero materials and zero efficiency.”
But that’s not all that the president of the Valencia government is being criticised for. Carlos Mazón had the unfortunate inspiration to appear at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, where he said that heavy rainfall was expected to “reduce its intensity” by about 6pm local time. Instead, however, by that hour, the rainfall intensified to a greater degree. Mayors of the affected cities, such as the mayor of L’Alcúdia, Andro Salom, have also accused him of “abandonment and complete incompetence”. “As mayor,” he said, “I was not informed by anyone of the danger that the Magret River could burst the levees. It filled the city with water, mud and debris.”
“There are political responsibilities behind this tragedy,” says Catalan Republican Left MP Gabriel Rufian. “The storm may have been inevitable, but there are people who lost their lives because they had to go to work and others who perished, it seems, because there were no well-equipped units to rescue them.”
Mason is also blamed for the fact that many employers ignored the –red alert warnings of the meteorologists and forced their employees to go to work as normal. The Spanish parliament heard accusations against Carlos Mason that he did not ask workers to stay home earlier in the day in an attempt to keep local businesses running.
But even after the tragedy, it seems that a lot of blame will be sought, not only for the lack of any preparedness in Valencia, but also for what caused it, in addition to climate change and the giant amount of rainfall: Experts say the uncontrolled urban growth of the Valencia region (which is Spain’s third largest city and one of the most rapidly growing areas) played a role in the tragedy. Roads turned into streams that drowned communities built next to streams, or on the banks of rivers that had been diverted…
