The expected appearance of Carlos Mazón to give explanations on the management of the emergency due to the devastating DANA that devastated Valencia has also helped the Valencian president start making your plans for the day after the tragedy. The popular baron has announced that he will ask the Government of Pedro Sánchez for power have just over 5.1 billion euros of European funds and the Recovery Plan without executing to start the investments of its reconstruction plan.
Money that would only be a first injection of the more than 31,000 million euros in which the Generalitat quantifies the total amount necessary to address damage and losses in the province of Valencia. “It is evident that we need a lot of money,” acknowledged Mazón, who considered one of his main tasks to demand that amount from the central government. A bulky volume that defended that “it is not a product of improvisation, far from it a whim“, but a “rigorous” calculation to “begin to recover” the territory after the storm.
Among the concrete measures to make the arrival of this economic injection possible, the Valencian president announced that he will urge Sánchez’s Executive to now activate funds and items that are unexecuted. Specifically, it will ask that the 2,091 million euros that the European Union granted to Spain within the framework of the Recovery Plan in June 2021 after the pandemic, intended for preservation of the coastline and water resourceswhich includes the fight against floods.
According to Mazón, that item has not been used during all this time and Now it would be used to “channel ravines and build water defenses that should already be done.”
The Generalitat Valenciana will also request the activation of other 3,060 million euros from the Water Digitalization Perte, which was approved in March 2022 but they are still not mobilized. The Valencian president used that poor execution also as an argument for his defense to transfer responsibilities to other organizations, especially the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ). “We need to be able to count on existing technologies that are already being applied in other basins, such as the Ebro” to anticipate future floods.
After the continuous fights and reproaches crossed with the state Administration, in his speech he mentioned the controversy, although without directly criticizing Sánchez: “Collaboration shouldn’t be something we have to request or negotiate, it should flow naturally as the response of a sensitive and conscious Government”.
Errors, apologies and responsibility
After announcing in the previous days that mistakes had been made and that it was necessary to make self-criticism, the Valencian president apologized, but without assuming responsibilities in the management of Emergencies that fateful October 29. In his turn to reply, he even postponed them to what happens with the reconstruction plan, by ensuring that he will assume “the political consequences of personally not running for re-election” if you are not able to lead that process.
He had previously acknowledged that the response to the catastrophe “was not as effective as it needed to be and it is something that you have to apologize. I, in the name of the Generalitat, do it.” He even went so far as to add that he had “the painful conviction that it could have been done better”. But when analyzing the errors, he hid behind other organizations and even technical protocols, which failed according to his version. About his delay in going to the Emergency Coordination Centerblamed “in bad weather” which produced “high traffic density”, after several versions were offered during these days and all different.
Mazón appealed both to the magnitude of a DANA with a volume higher than Aemet’s forecasts -even though he set the red alert which is extreme risk-, like the lack of information for two hours of the flooding of the Poyo ravine by the Confederation. “There was a lack of information and coordination,” he noted, adding that “we have learned from politicians and technicians what did not work well and we have corrected it.”
From no to the UVE to an Emergency Department
To face the mission of rebuilding the affected areas, Mazón also outlined the restructuring of his Government, which does not have a parliamentary majority. In addition to create a macro-vice presidency focused on the reconstruction planMazón, announced a new Department of Emergencies and the Interior to reformulate the protocols and the need to enhance “the public response.”
Mazón himself repealed the project a year ago to create the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE) planned by his predecessor Ximo Puig because he claimed then that it meant duplicating positions and functions in an area that was in the hands of Vox until last June.
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