The president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, wants to talk about the future. Of reconstruction. It is more difficult for him to explain, although he has tried, what he did on October 29 when a historic DANA hit the Valencian territory and took the lives of 219 people and left 13 missing. But what he has not talked about is the months prior to the catastrophe. Of the cuts in the Emergency Department and the paralysis of all the response plans put in place by the previous left-wing Government of the Pacte del Botànic. Mazón’s same announcement about the creation of an Emergency Department reveals his previous policy on climate change in his first months as president.
Thus, according to the documentation that elDiario.es has accessed, the Department of Justice and Interior had the four technician positions that the Botànic had planned for the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit frozen for 16 months. This unit, presented by former Minister Gabriela Bravo in 2022, sought to organize a team of experts for decision-making in cases such as the DANA of October 2024 and which would have been embedded in the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi).
After the announcement of the creation of the unit, it was financially allocated in the budgets of the Generalitat for 2023. Specifically, 500,000 euros were allocated, among other things, for the hiring of the six specialists who were to form that unit (four analysis technicians and emergency monitoring, a section head and a unit head). In the presentation of the budgets in the Corts by Gabriela Bravo, the unit’s budgetary allocation was reported. Verónica Marcos, PP deputy, criticized the measure as unnecessary. “For what?” he asked the then councilor Bravo, calling the measure a “smokescreen.”
Once the 2023 budgets were approved, the List of Jobs (RPT) was modified to incorporate the unit’s six new positions. During the Botànic period, two positions of head of section and unit were filled. When Carlos Mazón arrived at the Palau de la Generalitat, the Consell formed by the PP and Vox paralyzed both the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE) and the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit.
With this device, equipped with expert personnel, “we will be more prepared and will have the latest technologies to improve the response to fires and other major disasters,” explained the then Minister Bravo in the presentation of the unit.
In fact, the decree creating the UVE established the obligation to launch the analysis unit to anticipate danger based on vulnerability to different types of emergencies and their possible evolution, proposing possible protection measures for the population, infrastructure and vulnerable areas. And it also involved the integration of data with existing risk analysis mapping.
For this reason, it was “necessary” to have a software tool for predicting the behavior of meteorological and hydrological risks, as indicated by the deputy director general of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, in the tender specifications for the computer program. However, the Mazón Executive took 10 months to formalize the awarding of the ‘software’ destined for the Valencian Security and Emergency Response Agency, as this newspaper has reported.
The ‘software’ was not operational in DANA
In fact, the contract was finally formalized on October 26, three days before the catastrophic DANA. As a result of the enormous delay in formalizing the award, the computer program for predicting the behavior of meteorological and hydrological risks was not operational on October 29, when DANA devastated several regions in the province of Valencia.
It took just five months for the Mazón Government to eliminate the UVE project launched by its predecessor, the socialist Ximo Puig, also calling it a “chiringuito.” The creation of the UVE, in addition to the ‘software’ that was not operational during the catastrophic DANA, also meant the creation of the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit now recovered by Mazón.
“This unit was created to provide information to those responsible for the management of any type of crisis derived from the climate emergency, a team that will monitor the risk of forest fires or emergencies of meteorological origin to collaborate with the emergency services. in the anticipation of the behavior of these phenomena and the analysis of the critical scenarios they generate,” explained Gabriela Bravo.
The then Minister of Justice, Interior and Public Administration added that “the need to develop these planning, anticipation and intervention teams in the face of new major emergency scenarios” had been detected. The disastrous response of the Mazón Executive to DANA has proven him right too late.
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