Valencia Leader Admits Mistakes in Flooding Response, Announces Plan for Incident Inquiry
Valencia’s leader admitted mistakes while also casting blame elsewhere in his 15 November speech before the regional parliament to explain the government's response to disastrous flooding that hit the region in late October.
Regional President Carlos Mazón said the flooding that killed more than 215 people was an unprecedented and “apocalyptic” disaster that overwhelmed Valencia’s systems, The Guardian reports.
“I’m not going to deny mistakes,” Mazon said, adding he was “not going to shirk any responsibility.” He also pledged to create a parliamentary commission of inquiry to assess the incident and the response.
“You can’t learn from the past without knowing what really happened,” he said. “The people of Valencia have the right to know what happened…. We need to know why our prior experience of this kind of situation—and why the protocols that have been refined and improved over the past quarter century, and which had worked until Tuesday 29 October weren’t sufficient to avoid or mitigate the damages we’ve suffered.”
Valencia’s regional government is under immense pressure for how it handled the catastrophic flooding in part because it did not send emergency alerts to residents about the rising waters until almost 13 hours after a state agency warned of “very intense” rain, according to The Financial Times.
More than a year’s worth of rain fell on Valencia in just eight hours on 29 October, causing flash floods that destroyed homes, swept away vehicles, and created rivers in the streets. Thousands of people were impacted and more than 215 people were killed in the flooding that affected 70 localities around Valencia. The damage is expected to trigger insurance losses of more than $3.8 billion, based on an initial set of 72,000 claims.
The initial weather warning came from state weather agency AEMET and included technical alerts, said Jesús Lluch Ferrer, director-general of BUSF, a firefighters’ NGO specializing in disaster relief.
“But then the flow of information, and especially the reaction to that flow of information, was not sufficient,” Ferrer said. “The technicians can inform, they can warn, but they are not the executive branch. They can’t tell people to stay at home. They can’t tell companies to close their doors.”
Survivors are reported to be especially angry at Mazón who had a three-hour lunch with a journalist at the same time some towns and villages were experiencing flooding and reporting people missing. The Financial Times reports that Mazón kept his regular schedule on 29 October and even posted a now-deleted video to X (formerly known as Twitter) at 1 p.m. local time that the rains were moving away.
Members of Mazón’s party—the People’s Party (PP)—also blamed Teresa Ribera, Spain’s environment minister and a member of the Socialist Party, for not doing enough to raise concerns about flooding.
“Training is also an issue,” the Times said. “The slowness of the response pointed to a limited understanding of severe weather among some decision makers, who struggled to assess the extent of the threat and work out what to do.”
On 9 November, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand Mazón’s resignation. During his speech to the regional parliament on 15 November, protestors also protested outside, demanding accountability from Mazón for the flooding response.
In the session, Mazón said that the federal socialist-led government may shoulder the responsibility for a delayed response to the flooding.
“It is legitimate to ask whether the response to the requests for help, and the necessary coordination between institutions, was adequate in terms of time and shape, given the severity of the situation,” he said.
Mazón also cast blame on AEMET and the Júcar River Basin Authority for not giving “sufficient information and in time. We did the best we could in the situation we were in, with the information available, and with the resources we had, which was clearly not enough,” he said.
The flooding in Valencia is likely due to what scientists and meteorologists call a “cut-off low pressure storm system” that hovered over Valencia, EuroNews reports. These types of systems typically hit Spain in Fall and Winter, but warming sea temperatures and a warming atmosphere can increase the amount of rain the systems hold. Spain was also experiencing a drought, which may have left its soil less able to absorb the extreme amount of rainwater that fell.
“With every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall,” said Dr. Friederike Otto, lead of World Weather Attribution at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London. “These deadly floods are yet another reminder of how dangerous climate change has already become at just 1.3 degrees Celsius of warming.”
Severe weather continues to be an issue in Spain. On 13 November, forecasters warned that an additional 7 inches of rain could fall in the Valencia region in five hours. Elsewhere in Spain, more than 4,000 people evacuated the Malaga area in response to severe thunderstorms and significant rain that could cause the Guadalhorce riverbank to overflow.
“In just one hour, nearly a month’s worth of rainfall inundated the city of Malaga, in Spain’s Andalusia region,” CNN reported. “The southern Spanish province picked up roughly 100 millimeters (4 inches) of rain so far on Wednesday, 78 millimeters (3 inches) of which fell within an hour. Malaga normally averages 100.5 millimeters in the month of November.”
