Valencian floods: the ugly

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

What changed? Well, it was all down to how the Valencian government handled the crisis. In 2019, the President was the Socialist Ximo Puig, but this year it’s Carlos Mazón, from the Popular Party, the PP, Spain’s Conservatives. A comparison between their reactions is instructive (here’s a Spanish account).

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

Incidentally, after he heard about her lunch, Vilaplana’s ex-husband put up a tweet saying ‘seven years happily divorced’. I’m not quite sure what that means. Somehow, though, that enigmatic quality makes it feel amusing to me.

Mazón 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 to 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

At first, Mazón expressed his heartfelt thanks to the central government, headed by the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. This is no more than you’d expect from someone with any kind of sense of decency. However, it sadly reveals how little he’s used to the demands of party politics. A Conservative politician saying nice things about a Socialist Prime Minister? It wouldn’t do at all.

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.

Floods in Valencia: the good and the bad before the ugly

It was strange to wake up to eery stillness. Outside the city of Valencia, our place is usually quiet, but all the same there’s always a slight background noise of traffic, on the distant main road. But this time, there was practically nothing. 

It felt like the Covid lockdown, when muted mornings were standard. And indeed we were in a sense locked down. The government of the Valencian region had decreed that no cars should take to the roads until the evening. Why? There’d been a warning of heavy rain and the authorities were taking no risks.

The English proverb is ‘the burned hand fears the fire’. The French equivalent is more to the point, ‘the scalded cat fears cold water’, suggesting that once we’ve suffered harm from something really dangerous, we learn to fear even what isn’t. And then there’s the saying about locking the stable door after the horse has bolted. 

Because, though there was some heavy rain that day, there was none of the heavy flooding that sweeps cars away, fills houses with mud and drowns people. No, that happened over two weeks earlier, on 29 October. Then, when warnings really were needed, the regional authorities, whose duty it was, failed to issue any. 

Well, that’s not entirely true. They did issue a warning. At about 8:00 in the evening. One man later told journalists said that his mobile rang with an alert from civil protection when he was in his car and the water was already up to his chin. The first that friends of ours in Paiporta, one of the worst-hit areas, knew of what was about to happen was when they heard sirens and voices shouting, ‘the water is coming, the water is coming’. 

It's like Paul Revere, isn’t it? ‘The redcoats are coming, the redcoats are coming’. Only British soldiers trying to maintain colonial rule over insurgent American patriots are a lot easier to stop than a wall of water.

Our friend’s husband reacted as many do to a flood, if their car is an underground garage. He ran to it and drove it up to the street, before it could be submerged. That could have turned out very baldy. Many of the dead were trapped in their cars. Our friend was lucky and survived, although by the time he got home he was already up to his knees in water. As for his car, they still haven’t found it – parking it on the street was no safer than leaving it in the garage.

At least our friends had a few minutes to rescue possessions, and the good luck to live in a two-floor house, so they had somewhere to retreat to. 

Some of the moments that followed had a comic quality. They struggled to disconnect the TV from the wall, only succeeding in getting it upstairs once someone had found a screwdriver. They proudly, and laughingly, told us they’d saved their coffee machine. That may sound trivial, but once electricity had been restored, it was a boon to be able to make coffee. Above all, they avoided one of the losses that causes great grief in this kind of disaster: they got their family photos upstairs and saved their memories.

They heaped towels and cloths around the front door, but the water came in around the back. Once it reached them, it took minutes for it flood to a metre and a half up the walls of the ground floor. As it flowed in, they could do nothing but head upstairs.

We took them a Kärcher high-pressure water cleaner (that’s a devices that uses high-pressure water for cleaning, rather than a device for cleaning high-pressure water. Just saying. To avoid confusion). We were able to get within four kilometres by car but had to walk the last stretch.

And as we walked we began to see not only what’s bad about crises like this one but what’s good too. 

Volunteers on the Paiporta road

On the same road were thousands of volunteers, some heading home after a good job well done, some going in to take a turn themselves. Mostly they were young, carrying shovels or brooms, masked and in boots, sometimes with plastic bags wrapped around their legs too, since the mud in the streets was becoming increasingly infectious: sewage had mixed with it and there were also rotting bodies, principally 2950 farm animals but also, estimates suggest, several hundred pets.

Diseased sludge

The mud quickly turned toxic.

Deeper and wetter in some places than others

As we walked further into Paiporta, the mud got deeper, until we had to be careful where we stepped to avoid it flowing into our boots. There were also cars everywhere, piled up two or even three deep, where the water had simply tossed them. We saw an office which had filled with cars. Ironically, it belonged to an insurance company, though sadly it was in no state to deal with the claims the owners of the cars might make.

A different kind of traffic pile-up

Our friends live close to the waterway that burst its banks on the night of the flood. We crossed it on a bridge without parapets, as they’d been washed away. It was a strange experience, looking down into the bed of the river, now quiet and with only a residual stream of water, and think of the damage it had wreaked days earlier.

The Barranco del Poyo
In spate, it broke its banks

All around us, there were people at work. Many were volunteers. But there were also huge numbers of professionals. There were soldiers, many from UME, the military unit for emergencies, but reinforced by many more ordinary soldiers drafted in for rescue and recovery and then the cleanup. There were similar numbers of police, firefighters and other emergency service staff.

The army at work with heavy equipment
Note the (police) cavalry keeping an eye on things

Police cavalry

A great many weren’t even from Valencia. We saw fire vehicles from Barcelona, Navarra, Toledo, but that’s just what we came across. I understand there were teams from all over Spain there and even from other nations, from France and Italy, and even, as we later discovered, from Mexico.

Firemen from Toledo, near Madrid

Which takes me to uglier matters: the bitterness that has followed the flood.

Army bucket chain at work

One complaint I can understand, to be fair. Many victims felt it was taking too long to get basic services going again. It’s painful to be without drinking water or electricity for two or three days. However, for the vast majority (and that includes our friends) that’s all it took – two to three days. Another friend, from Florida, pointed out that two to three weeks without services is not unusual after hurricanes there.

Downright ugly have been the lies that have been told. Even two weeks on, we’re seeing people ranting online, ‘where is the army? Why aren’t they helping?’ Well, I can tell you where the army is. It’s on the ground helping. We saw a dozen soldiers outside our friends’ house, in a bucket chain, shifting mud out of the splash pool in their garden, which had naturally filled up with sludge.

Army helicopter above our home,
ferrying soldiers and supplies in or out of the affected areas

There were soldiers at work all over the affected areas, sometimes even with heavy equipment to clear the streets. Every day, we see large helicopters flying over our house, bringing troops or equipment in or out of the damaged zones. Statistics are dull, but just in brief, 8500 soldiers have been deployed. One of the iconic events in US history is the Battle of Yorktown, where American forces with their French allies definitively defeated the British army. The American army there was 8000-9000 strong. So the Spanish army working to help flood victims is of about the same size. Then there are 9700 police plus firemen and, of course, the hordes of volunteers for the cleanup.

If Washington’s army was big enough for that battle, the resources now deployed in the flood-damaged areas are enough for this one.

The most telling complaint is that warnings were issued too late. A lot too late, given the story of the man receiving an alert when already up to his chin in water. That was down to the regional government, specifically to its president Carlos Mazón. Initially, as ministers sent in national forces to assist, he thanked the central government for sending them. Since then, though, he’s changed his tune and taken to attacking the central government, trying to switch responsibility for the calamitous response to the floods, from his shoulders to theirs.

That’s been the ugliest reaction to the disaster. I’ll return to it shortly. This post has focused on the bad – deaths, damage, disease – and the good – volunteers and national or international health. The ugly has been the political reaction.

That deserves its own post.