The second vice president and counselor for the Economic and Social Recovery of the Valencian Community, retired lieutenant general Francisco José Gan Pampols, assured this week that “an ordinary alert plan” would have prevented many deaths caused by the floods and floods of last December 29. October. This statement by the one who has been chosen as the banner of reconstruction reveals the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, who more than a month after the catastrophe has not recognized any error of his own or that of his team, despite the fact that he has purged the half of the Emergency Department.
Mazón has tried to make the Government of Spain and all the institutions participating in the emergency operation responsible for managing the response, but the reality is that the powers were held by the Department of Justice and the Interior and, by extension, the head of the Consell. , who after 7:30 p.m. on DANA day assumed the presidency of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi). Despite the derivatives that the president has tried to open, the Generalitat had a protocol and two laws that establish how and when to act in a catastrophe of these characteristics.
If it had not been cut in the previous Emergency management, if on the day of DANA the Cecopi had been called in the morning or a day before or, for example, the mass alert had been launched on mobile phones earlier and with a more message overwhelmingly, deaths could also have been avoided. Gan Pampols is clear. The before and during were essential. elDiario.es reviews the 20 errors of Emergencies and of Mazón himself before and during DANA.
The arrival of the PP to the Generalitat Valenciana meant its trivialization. In the first Government of Carlos Mazón with Vox, the president handed over this strategic policy to the extreme right. It began cutting funds and resources and key contracts for the response to the floods were paralyzed. After the departure of Vox from the Executive, Mazón gave Salomé Pradas the negotiation of the Emergencies with a regional secretary who was not of his trust. The day after DANA, the already dismissed Emilio Argüeso was removed from directing the response.
The president of the Generalitat participated in three events unrelated to DANA during the morning of October 29 and before the long lunch with a journalist. The feeling of carelessness that he gave marked that of his entire Government, which also maintained its agenda. On the contrary, the University of Valencia suspended classes and the Provincial Council sent its employees home at 2:00 p.m. A president on alert would have changed the entire perception of risk in his team and in the rest of the citizens.
The Emergency Committee of the University of Valencia (UV) decided to suspend classes, thus preventing 1,718 students who live in l’Horta Sud, ground zero of the tragedy, from traveling. Mazón, on the contrary, criticized the decision in the last meeting he held on the morning of October 29. The head of the Consell also did not imitate the president of the Provincial Council of Valencia, an institution that at 2:00 p.m. on October 29 sent its workers home.
The controversial meal that lasted more than three hours with a journalist and the almost two hours that he was out of action between leaving the El Ventorro restaurant and arriving at Cecopi, have not yet been explained by the president of the Generalitat. Why did you decide that your presence at the forefront of the crisis was not necessary when, for example, the president of the Provincial Council of Valencia, Vicente Mompó, did attend Cecopi from the first moment and visited affected municipalities on October 29? The lack of leadership in this crisis lost golden time in the response to an emergency that has already cost 222 lives and four missing.
The massive alert to the population arrived at 8:11 p.m., after almost an hour of deciding on the text of the message and two hours after the possibility of “confining” the population and using the Es-alert system was put on the table. If Cecopi had been prepared or, if it had been convened in the morning, with the data available at 5:00 p.m. on the situation of the rains and the ravines upstream, citizens could have been notified of the situation.
The lack of flexibility of the then councilor Salomé Pradas, added to Mazón’s delay, led to the alert being sent when hundreds of citizens were already trapped. The subcontractor that manages 112 was notified at 6:10 p.m. that a mass message would be sent to all mobile phones in the province of Valencia, but finally the alert was not sent until 8:11 p.m. on the day of the tragedy. The Es-alert system was praised by Salomé Pradas’ predecessor, the councilor appointed by Vox, Elisa Núñez.
Decision-making throughout the catastrophe has been slow, which has aggravated its consequences. Five days after the DANA, the president of the Generalitat had the Cecopi paralyzed for eight hours to prepare his political strategy for confrontation with the Government. These were moments in which decision-making had to be quick, but the interest in controlling the story of the crisis and its image prevailed.
The Mazón Emergency team took more than an hour to request the second activation of the EMU on the day of the DANA. This is clear from an email to which elDiario.es had access sent to the ‘112 Comunitat Valenciana’ room at 7:34 p.m. on October 29 by the deputy director of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez. However, the Government Delegation and the National Emergency Monitoring and Coordination Center (Cenem) of the Ministry of the Interior received the final email with the request at 8:36 p.m. An hour and two minutes delay at a key moment, which also coincides with Mazón’s late arrival at the Cecopi meeting.
The Government delegate in the Valencian Community, Pilar Bernabé, called four times on DANA day, in just over an hour and a half, to offer the Valencian Generalitat the help of Pedro Sánchez’s Executive to face the consequences of the storm. . The calls offering the intervention of the UME were made by Pilar Bernabé to the Minister of Justice and Interior, Salomé Pradas, at 12:23, 12:48 and 2:00 p.m., after having received the red meteorological alert from AEMET and the warning from the Hydrographic Confederation. of the Júcar (CHJ) of the risk of overflows of the Magro River and the Poyo ravine, but the Executive of Carlos Mazón considered that He still did not need the resources of the State to help the population.
The emergency was directed by the head of the Valencia Provincial Firefighters Consortium, José Miguel Basset, an expert in forest fires. Later, it went into the background.
The head of the regional Executive took six days to put in charge of the communication of the Cecopi meetings the only senior official of his Consell with a solid resume in matters of catastrophes: the general director Rosa Touris, captain of the Civil Guard and former head of the National Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructures, an organization dependent on the Secretary of State for Security of the Ministry of the Interior and the National Center for Missing Persons of Spain (CNDES), a pioneer organization in Europe.
In contrast to the profile of Rosa Touris, Mazón himself chose an expert in bullfighting celebrations the same morning as DANA for the position of general director of the Interior, with delegated functions from the regional Police (a body with about 400 troops), of Civil Protection and the coordination of local police, among others. Pradas had kept the senior position, key in the response to emergencies, vacant for three months.
The autonomous Executive of Carlos Mazón took just four months to get rid of the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE), a project inherited from the previous Government of the Pacte del Botànic and in charge of guaranteeing rapid intervention anywhere in the territory in case of emergencies of origin. meteorological or seismic, extinguishing forest fires and tsunamis.
The Generalitat had its own equipment for measuring ravines and boulevards, operational on October 29. This team, led by the forest firefighters of the Generalitat and coordinated by the València Provincial Firefighters Consortium, spent two hours measuring the scale of the Poyo ravine. With 80 centimeters of flow, they were removed at 3:00 p.m. without any explanation. Given the information blackout that Mazón denounced, reality shows that Emergencies could have had its own data.
The general director of the Natural Environment, Luis Gomis, acknowledged in writing on DANA day that the autonomous Administration is also responsible for “monitoring flows in rivers, ravines, regulation systems and flood zones,” according to the Special Flood Plan. However, the same letter also ordered its environmental agents (in charge, among others, of measurements) to take refuge in “safe facilities.”
The Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ) sent two emails—at 4:37 p.m. and 4:50 p.m.—to the Civil Protection of the Valencian Community. They raised the alarm due to heavy rains in Chiva, at the head of the Poyo ravine. These emails dismantle the thesis that there was an information blackout about this ravine between 4:13 p.m. and 6:43 p.m. on October 29, as the PP and Mazón have been defending.
The Government of Carlos Mazón took more than 10 months to formalize a contract for an “advanced monitoring and decision-making aid system for the risks derived from floods”, intended for the Valencian Agency for Security and Emergency Response, dependent of the Department of Justice and Interior directed by Salomé Pradas. The contract was formalized just three days before the disaster caused by DANA. This system, foreseen by the previous progressive Government, would have helped the analysis of the data that came to Cecopi and the subsequent decision-making.
Although Salomé Pradas already announced a flood alert and weather forecast system almost a year ago, the final award was made a month after the DANA and due to urgent processing. The digitalization process in the largest treatment plant in the metropolitan area of Valencia would allow “creating early warning systems against urban flooding during rain episodes, by monitoring levels at key points of the urban sanitation and drainage networks” in addition to the “use of weather forecasting systems.
The last Metrovalencia convoys circulated on DANA day with the tracks flooded at the height of the Poyo ravine in Paiporta, despite the warning received shortly after 7:00 p.m. at the Railway Command Post of the Generalitat Valenciana (FGV). “No one died by chance,” according to FGV sources.
Although the University of Valencia suspended classes, the Department of Education, headed by José Antonio Rovira, did not react despite previous DANA notices.
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