After two days of severe weather warnings from the meteorological service, the alert level moved to red on the third day. The president of the Valencian community, the region on Spain’s Mediterranean coast embracing the provinces of Castellón in the North, Valencia in the centre and Alicante in the south, cancelled classes for 20,000 schoolkids, upped staffing on the 112 telephone emergency service, and strengthened support for dependent people and the homeless.
It's the regional Justice Minister who has direct responsibility for emergency services. She decided that, though the region was still on a lower level of alert than would have made it mandatory, she would summon the Integrated Centre for Coordinated Operations, the CECOPI, ‘given the gravity of the situation’.
That meant that regional and national resources were activated and coordinated when rivers began to burst their banks. Just three lives were lost. Three too many, for sure, but given the severity of the flood, about as low as one could hope.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ I hear you cry, ‘I thought there’d been more than 200 deaths.’
Ah, yes. But the 200+ deaths were in the floods last month in the province of Valencia. I was talking about the 2019 floods, in Alicante. That flood was less bad than this year’s, but even taking that into account, the contrast is appalling.
 |
| The Alicante floods |
When a journalist asked him to name the worst problem besetting a senior politician, the former British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, replied, ‘events, my dear boy, events’. Harold MacMillan and Ximo Puig apparently had the bandwidth to deal with events, such as the Cuban missile crisis (MacMillan) and the Alicante floods (Puig). Mazón, however, simply has much too much on his plate for such matters.
Where in 2019 peparations begans four days before the floods, when they hit this year, on 29 October, nothing was ready. A meeting of the Valencian government took place at 9:00 in the morning, but the subject of a possible flood didn’t even come up.
By contrast, the representative of central government in the region, Pilar Bernabé, cleared her diary. At 9:30, she starting contacting the mayors of the towns most at risk to warn them of what might be coming, though that wasn’t her job.
At midday, Mazón had another crucial task to deal with. He gave a presentation of the Community’s digital health policy. A flood, you see, is a momentary event, even if clearing it up can take months, and it only affects a minority of the region’s population, whereas a digital health policy is for years and affects everyone.
Bernabé, the central government representative, made four phone calls offering help to Salomé Pradas, the Valencian Justice Minister and therefore, as in 2019, the politician most directly responsible for handling emergencies. Pradas turned down the offer three times. Later, she would deny this, but the records reveal that her denial wasn’t (how shall I put this?) entirely accurate.
It was on the fourth call that Pradas finally accepted help, but only for the Requena-Utiel area within the Valencian Community.
At 14:30, with the floods under way, the first report came in of a missing person. The Interior Minister decided to summon the CECOPI, which had happened in 2019 on the day before the storms struck. In 2024, the meeting was summoned with the flooding already underway, and given the difficulty of getting people together, it only started at 17:00. Even then, no decision could be taken because Mazón, the President, was missing.
He'd been obliged to absent himself for a crucial lunch appointment. Since it, oddly, didn’t appear in his diary, he’s had to explain it since. The soul of discretion, he at first said it was a private appointment, no doubt out of discretion towards his guest, before announcing that it was a working lunch, and only admitting under pressure that his guest was a journalist, Maribel Vilaplana. He wanted to see her take over the regional TV service, À Punt. She says that it was a relatively brief meal, as lunches go in Spain, lasting only from 15:00 to 17:15. She has also said that he made no mention of any kind of difficulties in the region, which may be a tribute to an essential quality of a leader, to stay calm in a crisis. Or it maybe not.
She also says she turned down the À Punt job.
 |
| Mazón and Vilaplana |
He clearly had other urgent concerns, because he only made it to the CECOPI meeting at 19:00 or, according to other reports, at 19:30. By this time, the authority managing the Jucar river basin in which the flooding took place, had sent 198 messages so the CECOPI, so I imagine Mazón wisely felt he had enough information to take urgent action. Especially since the emergency phone service 112 had collapsed under the weight of calls for help.
Mazón issued the first alert at 20:11. You may remember that in my last post I talked about a driver telling a journalist that he received it in his car, with water already up to his chin.
As it happens, 95 soldiers from the Emergency Military Unit (UME) had gone into action earlier in the day, without waiting for orders. Those were small numbers, but I imagine the people they saved from drowning were grateful to see them.
Now, with Mazón finding the time in his busy schedule to issue a call for national help, the central government began to mobilise far more people. Of course, that takes time, and, with the late start, numbers only reached their maximum level by 4 November. By then there were 7800 soldiers working in the affected areas, backed by 5000 more in logistical and coordinating roles. This was the largest ever deployment of Spanish troops in peacetime. Some 9000 police were also at work, along with firefighters and other emergency service people from all over Spain and even from abroad: Italy and France sent help, and I also saw teams from Morocco and Mexico.
 |
| The UME at work in one of the worst-hit areas, Paiporta |
Fortunately, Mazón’s party, the PP, has leaders who understand the subtleties of political work. They quickly knocked Mazón into line. He then showed that he’s a quick learner, when tutored, by launching some well-honed attacks on such national bodies as the Meteorological Service and the Jucar River authority. Red alerts? A hundred and ninety-eight messages? How’s that in any way an adequate response to a crisis when the man responsible for dealing with it is as busy as Mazón?
And he certainly is the man responsible. Indeed, he’s jealous of that responsibility. It’s true that in a moment of weakness, the national PP leaders made the mistake of criticising Pedro Sánchez for not taking direct control of the response to the flood, something he has no constitutional authority to do. They soon dropped that criticism, however, when they realised it meant that they were implicitly criticising their own man in charge of Valencia, and they certainly didn’t want to do that. They need him there, not least because following the floods there are lucrative reconstruction contracts to be awarded.
This is especially important because, given the emergency, contracts can be awarded without any kind of competitive procurement process. Competitive tendering is so tedious, a bureaucratic process which stops you just awarding contracts where you want to. Which means you can’t hand them out to your friends, and your friends are the people you trust most, aren’t they? And people you trust are vital in a crisis like this one.
Since he doesn’t have to go through a competitive process, Mazón has been able to award some contracts to people he feels he can count on. For instance, two contracts, worth 12.9 million euros, have gone to a company called Ocide Construcción. It’s the subject of a corruption probe by the police at the moment, concerning bribes paid to a lawyer working for a former Mayor of Valenica, Rita Barberá. She’s been dead for nearly eight years, making it all sound a bit like ancient history, for a busy man with problems to deal with in the present and no time for the past, or for mere allegations of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the campaign against central government keeps ticking along. Why, that interesting semi-trade union, Manons Limpias (Clean Hands), brought cases against the national meteorological service and the River Jucar Authority for negligent homicide in the floods. Manos Limpias have been doing a great job on the Prime Minister’s wife, Begonia Gómez, pursuing her through the courts even though the police and various judges have said the allegations against her are groundless. Just keeping that kind of thing going creates an atmosphere in which voters wonder whether there can be smoke without fire. And isn’t it sophisticated to go after the Prime Minister’s wife rather than the Prime Minister himself? It gives him much less chance to respond and may well cause him more grief.
Sadly, though, the judge hearing the case against the Meteorological Service and the Jucar authority, threw out those suits on the basis that there was no case to answer. Since Manos Limpias had also brought cases against Mazón himself, and those have been allowed to stand, I imagine he has serious doubts about how unbiased the judge is.
Still, overall the campaign’s not going too badly. It’s focused on the late arrival of the army, and the army is a national body and not a local one, so it’s easy to build on the understandable anger of the victims of the floods and turn it against the central government. Focusing on the delays for which the Mazón administration was responsible could distract from the attack on the Sánchez government. And that’s what matters.
Of course, some might feel that after the good of the floods (the pouring in of volunteers) and the bad (the destruction and deaths) that I mentioned last time, the political fallout is the ugliest side of this dismal business. But that’s to misunderstand right-wing politics in our time.
After all, as Trump has shown in the States, it’s getting to power that counts. Not how you get there.
No comments:
Post a Comment