No one was at the controls of the emergency system when the flood arrived
Mazón was ‘out’ at crucial hours and the councilor was unable to make decisions
Without a presumption of reliability, life in modern societies would fall apart. I am referring to trust in what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls “expert systems”, those organizations structured through the intense use of computer media whose efficiency and risk reduction we take for granted. A hospital, an airline, a railway company, a bank, the public administration or the emergency prevention and response apparatus are some of those systems whose reliability Giddens explains that “takes the form of anonymous commitments on which faith in the management of knowledge of which a lay person is largely ignorant.”
We get on a plane, travel by train or subway, undergo surgeries and treatments, even if we don’t know the pilot, driver or surgeon, because we trust the expert systems to work. It was not too much to expect, therefore, that the Valencian emergency system, with the knowledge, legislation and computer and communication means that allow meteorological episodes to be monitored in real time, would respond to a DANA like the one this October with due diligence. efficiency. But there was no one at the controls of the Valencian emergency system.
In recent days, while the recovery from the catastrophe was unfolding in the devastated affected populations and fatalities are still being found, we have been able to reconstruct what happened for this emergency system to fail so miserably, and with such lethal effects. And we have discovered that there was a tragic distraction at the top of the mechanism. The hours elapsed between the moment in which the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, left the Palau on October 29 for a “working” meal and his arrival at the meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) place outside of I played the head of the structure when his presence was most crucial. A politician who takes refuge, in moments of trouble, in a small circle of regional secretaries of the Presidency, a kind of ‘politburo’ made up of the essential members of the Alicante group that accompanies him.
with the president outthe person in sole command of the operation, the Minister of Justice and the Interior, Salomé Pradas, kept the Cecopi meeting for hours without taking any action, waiting for the head of the Consell to make a decision. Neither did the regional secretary of Security and Emergencies, Emilio Argüeso. It was as if in the cockpit of a commercial flight the pilot was unwell without anyone taking charge of the instruments, or as if in an operating room a critically ill patient went into cardiac arrest waiting for the surgeon without the health personnel taking any initiative. . And, as we have learned later, the emergency management structure was half disjointed.
We are living in sad days, in which the information we are offering outlines an intolerable situation of dysfunction in an expert system that had the mission of being in a position, at any time, to reduce the brutal impact of the floods and to quickly launch the response to its effects. The PP tries to confront this evidence with an argument that, among other things, seeks to downplay the mass sending of the alert SMS to all citizens, that alert that arrived so late and that Minister Pradas has alleged that they explained to her that it could be used minutes before it was broadcast. It will be difficult to camouflage the tremendous fiasco of emergency management that failed just when it had to work, with the disproportionate toll of destruction and victims that this DANA has claimed in Valencian lands.
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