Three weeks after catastrophic flash flooding left 220 dead and scores missing in Spain, personal negligence, climate denial, and emergency warning systems unfit for an overheating world are looming large as factors behind the high death count.
Close to 130,000 people took to the streets of the coastal capital of Valencia last week, demanding the resignation of the region’s president, reports The Guardian.
Traumatized by the Oct. 29 tragedy, the protestors are outraged by what they see as negligence on the part of Carlos Mazón and his administration, in both the lead-up to the disaster and its aftermath.
Post-mortems of the days and hours leading up to the flooding reveal a bitter cascade of failure to respond to and communicate the extreme danger faced by residents of the east coast Valencia region as a storm of epic proportions bore down on them.
Worst-hit areas saw 400 litres of rain per square metre fall in an eight-hour period, the Guardian says in a separate report.
“A relatively strong storm, a powerful downpour like those we see falling in spring or summer, can be 40 or 50 litres per square metre. This practically multiplies it by 10,” said State Meteorological Agency (AEMET) spokesperson Rubén del Campo, speaking with the Spanish daily El País.
The intense rain is being attributed to “a phenomenon known as the gota fría, or ‘cold drop,’ which occurs when cold air moves over the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea.” The movement “creates atmospheric instability as the warm, moist air (is) rising rapidly to form towering, dense clouds capable of dumping heavy rain,” writes the Guardian.
Mediterranean waters are warming fast, with some parts of the sea currently as much as 5℃ above normal. Warmer air can hold more water vapour, which means more, and heavier, rainfall.
Out for Lunch
While Mazón has tried to pin blame on AEMET, records show the agency warned of potentially catastrophic flooding five days beforehand, issued an orange alert the evening of Oct. 28, and upped that to a full-blown red alert at 7:30 a.m. the next morning.
Officials who followed AEMET’s updates kept their constituents, including local schoolchildren, safe.
“By mid-afternoon, some local governments and cities in the Valencia region were taking their own precautions,” reports Bloomberg. “Workers were being sent home, schools and universities were closing early, and the army’s emergency unit was preparing to deploy troops to Utiel, a city roughly 37 miles west of the region’s capital, in case help was needed.”
But “rather than activating emergency protocols and triggering wider alerts” upon receiving the red alert from AEMET, Mazón “went off to the next meeting on his schedule.”
He then went “off the grid” for roughly five hours, reportedly for a private lunch with an unidentified reporter.
When Valencia’s local government finally assembled its emergency crisis committee at 5 p.m., Mazón was nowhere to be found. He finally arrived at around 7 p.m., and a region-wide text message urging people to take shelter was sent out “a little more than an hour later.”
“But by then, it was too late,” writes Bloomberg.
Climate Denial
While Mazón is increasingly in the crosshairs of blame, the pattern of negligence extends far beyond him, and is rooted in right-wing climate denial.
Members of Compromís, a left-wing alliance in the Valencian parliament, presented Mazón and his far-right-on-climate People’s Party with proposals to respond to the growing risk of flooding in the region no less than four times over the last year, writes climate journalist and Compromís MP Juan Bordera in a recent Guardian op-ed.
Each time, they were turned down by a party with what he called “a terrible record on believing in the climate crisis and taking it seriously.”
The climate-denying impulses of the People’s Party went into overdrive last year, when it secured power in Valencia by entering into a first-of-its-kind agreement with the far-right Vox party, which has designated environmentalism as “the new communism.”
“As part of the deal, Mazón handed environmental policy over to his coalition partners, who promptly named a climate change denialist to oversee the portfolio,” writes Bloomberg.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s socialist president, has made sure to reconnect the dots between extreme weather and global heating.
“Climate change kills, and we are seeing it, sadly,” Sanchez told a news conference where he announced a €10.6-billion (C$15.7-billion) aid and recovery package for the region.
Warning Systems Need Rethink
Personal and political failures are not the only lapses receiving attention in the wake of the floods.
While warnings that came too late clearly contributed to the suffering of Valencians, timeliness is only one component of an effective warning system, writes EuroNews.
Recipients need to be able to fully understand a warning and know concretely what to do to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.
“If the information they are given is not being understood because the recipients don’t have the reference or context, then that warning is of little value,” Lars Lowinski, an expert on severe weather from the website Weather & Radar, told EuroNews.
“Just providing numbers of rainfall totals (e.g. 400 millimetres in 12 hours) without describing relevant impacts and possible measures to protect life and property is of little use unless one has some background in meteorology.”
“Trust is also important,” EuroNews adds.
“People need to believe the information they are being sent and that relies on the agency providing it having a good track record of accurate, useful warnings.”
