Any expert in crisis and disaster management knows that the most important thing to avoid falling off the precipice of a tragedy is prevention and information. Once inside, the most important thing to get out of the abyss is a quick response, good management and political stability. Valencia could not be further from that point eleven days after a flood engulfed more than 200 lives in half an hour, knocked out 300,000 people and devastated a territory equivalent to the city of Lugo.
The center of València was pulsating this Saturday and it was not because of the shopping or the evening. From four in the afternoon, neighbors and columns of volunteers began to walk towards the capital from ground zero, covered in mud. On the way, a dull murmur passed through open shops and terraces. Stories were told, social gatherings were held, anguish was expressed. In the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, body to body, a contained rage throbbed, facing the wall of silence to misunderstood questions: “Why didn’t they warn?” “Why didn’t they come sooner?” “Why have they abandoned us?” A vein full of anger and sorrow that finally had a street to spill out. Eleven days cleaning with brooms they bought themselves. Eleven days providing food or diapers, surviving without electricity or water, cooking for neighbors. Eleven days looking for bodies, praying for the car to appear and maybe, inside, your father, your sister, your aunt.
Other highlights must be added to the disastrous management. That the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, was unreachable on the Tuesday of the tragedy due to a frivolous meal, instead of at the emergency controls; that the counselor in charge said she did not know anything about the ES Alert system until that day; that another ordered the families of the disappeared to stay in the house they had lost to wait for news… The rage that was seen in Paiporta against the royal entourage was still encapsulated and exploded this Saturday to the majority cry of “Mazón, resignation ”, although there were also some banners against Sánchez and the politicians. The coming scenario, currently with Mazón himself and his Consell at the helm of management, is unknown.
People around him say that the president wants to endure and considers making his two councilors resign as a ritual sacrifice to a people who have said enough, but do not plan to leave. Feijóo has withdrawn his support. The mayor of Valencia does not know him when she passes him on the street. In his party he has a group of faithful and a politburo of advisors. Out of there, Mazón stains. After the “private work lunch”, burn. The street, this historic Saturday vibrating with desolation and rage, with 130,000 protesters (the capital has 800,000 citizens), catches fire. After a peaceful process, at the last minute, some riots, firecrackers and police charges.
In the still unlikely event that he heeded the protest and resigned, no one from his government could replace him, because none of them are deputies, and whoever was elected (with the mayor in the pools) would have to have the support or abstention of Vox. The option of elections in the midst of this tragedy is unthinkable. Staying in office, without the support of the party, shameful daily headlines and the indignation of the street, is a via crucis that interferes every day with the only important thing: helping people and solving the tragedy. “Would you entrust this man with the reconstruction of your house or would you stay calm if he was the one looking for your family?”, a man from Catarroja responds with a rhetorical question.
Psychologists who have attended ground zero, accustomed to tragedies or violent events, say that when you suffer a traffic accident the nervous system decompensates and becomes altered. When the ambulance, the police, arrives, he calms down, understands that the remedy is arriving and begins to return to his parameters. In Valencia there are towns where that ambulance has not yet arrived. The driver, with no points on his license, is attending to his own political emergency these days.
A group of bewildered tourists wonder if there is football today: “No ma’am, there are dead people.” Young people with traces of mud, stained boots held high, groups of older people, families. The popular army of volunteers that has exchanged brooms for banners: “I am here for those who cannot come”, “Mazón a la Karcher”, “Mazón to the prison”, “Plorant de ràbia”, “Sánchez and Mazón, no olvido nor forgiveness.” “Valencia lives matter,” reads on a sweatshirt in some squares that cannot be filled with people who still do not understand how they crossed their arms in the face of the worst flood. “Help,” another sign asks bluntly.
The Popular Party of the Valencian Community had the debatable idea of delegitimizing the protest as a Catalan thing. Really, if there were so many, Valencia would have already held a process and become independent. Mazón took advantage of the afternoon to tweet all the achievements of the week, achievements that do not reach street level or arrive too slowly. As if their social networks could cover up the shame of a stumbling management: this Friday the first SMS of health precautions was sent to mobile phones in Valencia, with cases of infection already being studied and many infected and open wounds.
There are those who are looking for a borrowed house, those who try to dry the deeds to ask for help, those who have a garage full of cars and perhaps a corpse, hair salons that cannot open, self-employed people who cannot work, hundreds of thousands of inhabitants who cannot move. , because cars no longer exist in l’Horta Sud. The fishermen of the Albufera fish for corpses these days. “I’m looking for the man who saved me, to save me I saw how the flood took him away.” Traumas, traumas and more traumas. “Mentre menjava, el poble s’ofegava,” they chanted to Mazón at the doors of the Palau de la Generalitat.
The street burst with a transversal protest that overflowed the acronyms of those who organized it. Thousands of citizens told the Consell this Saturday that whoever carried out a disastrous management must leave and cannot continue to command it, with the unknown abyss that this entails. The Coordination Center (Cecopi) is more choral today, the army is much more deployed and fortunately it is self-managed. But Mazón rules, a lot, and continues to be the political head of the disaster and the one who promotes and approves the measures. Eleven days after the tragedy, day-to-day life still overwhelms logistical problems. An emergency without clamps. A president in ambush. An unpredictable political situation. Valencia pulses with rage, although it pumps out hope for the volunteers and the primitive instinct of survival. “We have to get out of this.” Valencia has too many fronts. With a mud crisis, in the streets and another in the Palau de la Generalitat, he juggles in a circus with abysses in two rings.
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