As rescue crews and residents of Valencia search the mud, piles of cars and wreckage for missing people, anger against state authorities abounds. The death toll of 95 is expected to rise, approaching the worst flood disaster Spain has seen - the 87 Pyrenees floods that killed 1996. And in Spain, the blame game has begun for a disaster that might have been smaller had it been managed differently. At the center is the governor of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, as the main person responsible for the absence of any prevention or rescue mechanism…
Anger is directed at Valencia's local government. This is because the local government has the authority but also the ultimate responsibility to coordinate the emergency services in the affected areas. Instead of doing that, however, he sent a message through Spain's 112 system at 8:12 p.m., eight hours after the flooding had begun and 8 hours after Spain's national meteorological agency, AEMET, issued an "extreme danger" warning. .
"The magnitude of the tragedy raises doubts about whether the population was warned too late: Civil Protection sent alerts when there were already flooded cities," read a headline on the website of El Mundo newspaper. As the newspaper continues, "hundreds of people were trapped overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday in industrial areas and on roads because roads were already cut off and access was cut off."
Not that AEMET remains immune. Spaniards on social media say forecasters underestimated the phenomenon as they did not expect it to reach this extent and did not let the public know they were in extreme danger. Of course, as the professor of the British university The Open, Dr. Kevin Collins, “despite the fact that warnings have been issued for south-east Spain, the scale and intensity of the rainfall shows us that these warnings offer little room to avoid 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 "drowning" said that "due to the heavy rains, all movements in the region of Valencia should be avoided in order to prevent the collapse of the roads" and asked citizens to wait for further information 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 the streets, possibly many were already dead. The issue has also disturbed the central government with an official of the Ministry of Ecological Transition stating that "by the time the authorities of Valencia 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 citizens' mobile phones to restrict mobility when necessary... Why this significant delay in sending alert messages to mobile phones, advising them not to travel or not go to workplaces? We don't know."
But that was not all. The victims who had survived and were frozen on the roofs of the houses they had climbed, had no way of communicating with the rescue crews - or with their own people. Landline and mobile phone networks went down very early at midday on Tuesday and all emergency calls were directed to 112, which also went down a few hours later. So residents who needed help quickly realized they were on their own. The rescue crews were absent. The rescuers did not know where to go, and there was no way to get to the flooded areas. In some cases they had to rescue their own facilities from the flood, or wait for news about their colleagues who were swept away by the waters. El Pais writes that Mazon explained that rescue efforts were hampered by the absolute inability to reach 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 missing members."
Mazon in the crosshairs
The president of the government of Valencia, Carlos Mazon, is the one on whom all the fingers are pointed by those who are looking for responsibility for the multi-fatal disaster that plunged Spain into mourning. The conservative Mazon is accused by his political opponents, the media and citizens on social networks that the first "job" he did when he was elected, last year, was to abolish the UVE. This is the Emergency Unit of Valencia, which was created by the previous local government to respond to climatic disasters such as floods and fires.
To the extent the matter took, Mazon was forced to respond with a statement from the government of Valencia. In it, he said more or less, that UVE was abolished because "it was just another imaginary organization, with zero firefighters, zero materials and zero efficiency."
But that is not the only thing for which the president of the government of Valencia is criticized. Carlos Mazon had the unfortunate inspiration to appear at a press conference at noon on Tuesday, where he said the heavy rain was expected to "reduce its intensity" from around 18.00:XNUMX local time. Instead, however, since that time, the precipitation has intensified to a greater degree. The mayors of the affected cities, such as the mayor of L'Alcudia, Andro Salom, accuse him of "abandonment and complete incompetence". “As mayor,” he said, “I was not informed by anyone of the danger that the Magre River might break the levees. The city was filled with water, mud and debris."
"There are political responsibilities behind this tragedy," says Catalan Republican Left lawmaker Gabriel Rufian. "The storm may have been inevitable, but there are people who died because they had to go to work and others who perished, it seems, because there were no well-equipped units to rescue them."
Mazon is also blamed for the fact that many employers ignored the warnings - red alert - of the meteorologists and forced their workers to go to work as usual. Spain's parliament has heard accusations against Carlos Mazón that he did not ask workers to stay home earlier in the day in an effort to keep local businesses open.
But even after the tragedy, it seems that many blames will be sought, not only for the lack of any preparedness in Valencia, but also for what caused it, apart from climate change and the gigantic amount of rainfall: experts say that uncontrolled urban development of the region of Valencia (which is the third largest city in Spain and one of the regions with the most rapid growth), played a role in the tragedy. Roads turned into streams that drowned communities, which were built next to streams, or on the banks of rivers that had been diverted…
Source: protothema.gr
