Miguel Ángel was drinking water in his car in the Valencian town of Picanya at quarter past eight on Tuesday evening, when his phone suddenly beeped loudly. It was an alert from the emergency center, Valencia’s version of NL-Alert.
At that point, he had been “cutting through the mud” for an hour, Ángel told the news site eldiario.es. Like him, thousands of Valencia residents were also shocked by the heavy flood water that hit the Orange area on Tuesday and Wednesday. The death toll reached 155 people (and three more occurred in other areas), and this figure will not stop there. “There is still a lot missing,” Defense Minister Margarita Robles said on Thursday.
Now that Valencia’s mud volcanoes are slowly draining and the scale of the disaster is becoming clear, questions are being raised as to whether the floods have claimed many lives. Spanish weather authority Aemet announced a code red at half past seven in the morning due to forecast rainfall. Aemet only does this if there is a ‘very high risk to the population’.
But it took more than half a day before the alarm signal, containing an urgent call not to travel, reached Valencians. Early in the afternoon, regional president Carlos Mazón even stated the forecast that ‘the intensity of the bad weather will decrease around six o’clock’. When after midnight it became clear just how big the disaster really was, Mazón deleted the messages that impacted X.
Apocalyptic landslide
Especially for residents of the southwest suburbs of Valencia, such as Paiporta and Picanya, the water comes as if from nowhere. It rarely rains here on Tuesdays; the water that will cover these places flows during the day from the highlands to the west, where rainfall reaches 400 millimeters.
Usually this water is channeled into the sea, through what they do in eastern Spain travel to call. These are channels several meters wide and deep that often run directly through a site. Usually Ramblas dry; They only fill up during bad weather. Because these canals can absorb large amounts of water, residents of these places almost always keep their feet dry.
In this case, so much water flows that the resulting mudflow overflows the banks. Many residents are no longer able to carry out their activities and have been swept away by the apocalyptic currents. Some people were able to climb to a safe height, thanks to neighbors throwing ropes and cloths from their balconies, but many were not so lucky.
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‘We are not meteorologists’
“We are not meteorologists here,” Mazón told the press on Thursday at a hastily built coordination center in Valencia. ‘We only convey what meteorology tells us’, in this case the information that will be explained in the afternoon.
Mazón, the regional president representing the far-right Popular Party, was also criticized for previously rejecting plans to create a new emergency aid unit. The unit, the brainchild of the previous left-wing regional government, is expected to increase the ‘speed and effectiveness’ of emergency aid delivery.
However, shortly after taking office in July 2023, Mazón repealed the unit, which would be a waste of public money and would only complicate the emergency aid structure. His party proudly declared the decision as an example of how Valencia would make significant cuts to public spending.
‘They have forgotten us’
In the newspaper Country Sources from the regional government still said the decision was the right one. “The only good thing about this unit is that it creates jobs for its cronies.” Moreover, there is already a national military assistance unit, the UME. More than a thousand troops have been deployed to the disaster site since Tuesday evening, where they are trying to search for missing people along with firefighters.
However, according to affected city managers, this assistance is too little and too late. “They have forgotten us,” Juan Ramón Adwarna, the mayor of tiny Alfafar, said in despair before the cameras of a regional broadcaster on Thursday. In Punt. ‘I haven’t seen a fire truck or UME in days. (…) There are people who have to live in the same house as corpses.’