More details continue to be known about the key meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) during the afternoon of the fateful DANA that left more than 220 dead in the Valencian Community. At the meeting, according to the newspaper Lift EMV and has also confirmed The Countrythe public body that managed the storm even considered “confining” the population, sending a warning message for them to take refuge on the highest floors of the homes and making a live connection on regional television. À Punt to warn citizens of the danger of floods due to torrential rains. But none of this was done. “Doubts” and “the absence of Carlos Mazón” delayed the sending of a “decaffeinated” alert that arrived when numerous municipalities were already flooded.
The meeting was called at 5:00 p.m. and was chaired by the Minister of the Interior and political leader of Emergencies of the Generalitat, Salomé Pradas, who is in the spotlight for her management of the storm. The name of Pradas is in all the pools to leave the Consell after having changed the version of what happened in this key event several times in recent days. In fact, he confirmed to the media that it was during the event (around 8:00 p.m.) when he learned that there was the possibility of sending mass alert messages to all mobile phones with the system. ES-Alert, despite the fact that the Valencian Administration itself had carried out tests on its operation in 2022.
The first break in the meeting occurred around 5:30 p.m. and lasted about 30 minutes. The president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, still did not appear, which delayed the decision-making of Cecopi.
According to both media reports, it was between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. when the L’Eliana emergency center put on the table the possibility of “confining” the population to their homes and to employees in their jobs, although without mandating it as happened in March 2020 in the first days of the pandemic.
He also discussed the possibility of using the ES-Alert system to send a mass alert to mobile phones located in the provinces affected by DANA, but as he explains Lift EMVthe content of the message and the language used in it raised all doubts of a legal nature and further delayed decision-making.
Mazón arrived after 7:30 p.m.
Carlos Mazón joined the command post after 7:30 p.m. and not at 7:00 p.m. as the president of the Generalitat himself has recognized, who was at a working lunch with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana to offer her the direction of regional television À Punt. This arrival, according to various sources to the aforementioned media, occurred when the “lack of control was absolute” and caused a new delay in sending alerts to the population because the full seriousness of the situation had to be explained to Mazón from scratch.
Those responsible debated whether to include the words in the message “confinement” and “evacuation”but in the end the alert that was sent was much more weak: “As a preventive measure, any type of movement in the province of Valencia should be avoided.” The warning came after 8:10 p.m., when many municipalities were already flooded by the flood.
Likewise, El País goes further and reports that Cecopi considered the idea of making a live connection with À Punt television to warn the population in a more direct way so that they could protect themselves from the floods. However, no connection was made with the media until after 9:00 p.m. when President Mazón appeared.
The head of the Consell has defended during these days that at Cecopi “everyone was doing their job; everyone was where they needed to be“Everyone was presiding over Cecopi and I was promptly informed, as in any other storm alert,” he stressed.
“Everything changes after 7:00 p.m.”according to Mazón, because it is when the storm “turns into a flood and when the Confederation of the Ministry tells us that as of 7:00 p.m. that entire channel had overflowed.” “Until that moment, what we were doing was punctually informed, with a working lunch and then in the unit’s office,” he declared.
Ribera called him up to 4 times
On the other hand, we must remember that the Minister of Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, Teresa Ribera, assured in an interview on Cadena Ser that she managed to speak with the ‘president’ of the Generalitat Valenciana after calling him “four times”, once he perceived the “concern” in Cecopi about the “difficulty” in decision-making and the “seriousness of the situation.” After calling him four times, according to his version, he contacted Mazón around 7:30 p.m., who assured him “that everything was going well but this afternoon everything was rushed.” In addition, he sent him an SMS to provide him with the help of the Government.
For his part, Mazón assured that he saw the SMS sent by the minister “later”, when he had already moved to 112 CV, located in L’Eliana, where “there was no coverage.” He reiterated that Ribera contacted him “after the alert, after the flood warning,” while maintaining that it is “fundamental” to be able to “clarify” the conversations held with Ribera “during that day and during the previous days.” “.
#Cecopi #considered #possibility #confining #population #Valencia #afternoon #DANA #Mazón #untraceable
