The president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, of the PP, kept his institutional agenda intact on the day of the dana ——, despite knowing the seriousness of the situation since 9:00 in the morning and commissioning a report from his team first thing in the morning about the risk, as EL PAÍS has learned. “Mazón was worried in the morning,” confirms a leader who held a high position in the regional Executive during the deadly cold drop.
During the plenary session of the Consell – the governing body of the Generalitat that is made up of the president, the vice presidents and advisors—which was held between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. on the day of the tragedy, the danger of torrential rains was discussed after the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) decreed the red alert, the maximum on the scale, at 7:36 a.m., as confirmed to EL PAÍS by an attendee at this meeting, whose deliberations are secret, and a spokesperson for the Generalitat.
As a result of exposing the danger, after the plenary session of the Consell, Mazón’s team commissioned the then Minister of Justice and Interior, Salomé Pradas, who today is the main defendant in the case about the misfortune being instructed by the judge of Catarroja (Valencia) Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, a report on the situation. The document addressed the moment that the Valencian region of La Ribera Alta was going through – which includes municipalities such as Carlet, l’Alcúdia and Algemesí – and the Aemet alert.
The Generalitat denies the existence of this report to this newspaper, despite the fact that it has been requested from the Catarroja judge who is investigating the damage due to the popular accusation exercised in the case by the Intersindical union. Furthermore, Counselor Pradas herself referred to the existence of this document last April, when she declared that it was being investigated in court. “I got up to ask about the report that the Presidency was asking for.” [de la Generalitat]”, he said to the instructor.
The Mazón Executive has agreed to give the details about how the dana was addressed in the plenary session of the Consell on 29-O. “The Valencian Government gave all the significance and importance to the activation of the red alert at 7:36 a.m. on the morning of October 29. The plenary session of the Consell, as it could not be otherwise, dealt with the situation, giving information about it to the [ex] advisor Salomé Pradas,” indicates an official spokesperson.
Despite having the report of the potential risk of the waterspout on the table, Mazón continued with his institutional agenda during the morning of the fateful day. And the Generalitat did not send the massive alert to mobile phones to warn the population of the magnitude of the storm until eleven hours after the plenary session of the Consell where the issue was addressed began. The notification was sent to the phones at 8:11 p.m., when most of the 229 fatalities had died, were missing or trapped in ground floors and garages.
After leaving the plenary session of the Consell, Mazón continued with his institutional agenda, despite the fact that the Aemet warned – after decreeing the red alert – of “extreme danger” at 9:30 am. He president He later attended an event at the Palau de la Generalitat, in the heart of Valencia, regarding the granting of the Aenor sustainable destination certificate to the Valencian Community. Then, at 12:30, he went to the presentation of the regional digital health strategy. And at 1:45 p.m., he returned to the Palau de la Generalitat to discuss the regional budgets with union and business leaders. The head of the Consell went so far as to describe the decision of the University of Valencia to suspend classes as exaggerated in the eyes of these social agents.
At the end of the last event of the morning, Mazón headed to the El Ventorro restaurant, a 10-minute walk from the headquarters of his Government, where he participated in the most enigmatic entry on his agenda: the almost four-hour lunch (from 3:00 p.m. to 6:45 p.m.) with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana, to whom he offered the direction of the public television À Punt. During lunch, the head of the Consell had four calls with the then counselor Pradas (5:37 p.m., 6:16 p.m., 6:25 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.).
From the moment Mazón and Vilaplana entered the establishment until they left, the storm situation worsened. Starting at 4:40 p.m., 112, the Generalitat’s telephone switchboard, received dozens of desperate calls warning about the overflowing of the Poyo ravine near towns like Chiva or Cheste. And, starting at 6:30 p.m., the waters of this boulevard overflowed and caused the great wave that buried municipalities such as Paiporta or Catarroja, where the flood left 56 and 25 dead, respectively. He president and the journalist were still in El Ventorro.
the body of the Generalitat that managed the misfortune and from where it was decided to send the alert to the phones. Starting at 7:00 p.m., the activation of the ES Alert mobile notification system was discussed in this crisis device. Previously, the conclave focused on the potential risk of overflowing the Forata dam, in the municipality of Yátova, an infrastructure that could have caused 20,000 deaths, according to reports from the Generalitat. A source who attended Cecopi thus recalls the lack of a quorum that was planned for this event, where 29 representatives of state, regional and municipal institutions participated. “They said that a dam was going to burst and they couldn’t agree,” he says.
The recognition of the Generalitat that the plenary session of the Consell took into consideration the red alert decreed by the Aemet at 7:36 a.m. on October 29th demolishes the so-called theory of the information blackout, to which the Consell itself, the PP and the two former high-ranking officials of Mazón who have been charged have clung vehemently: the former counselor Salomé Pradas and who was his number two during the storm, the former general director of Emergencies, Emilio Argüeso. The idea indicated that, if the regional Executive acted late and poorly, it was because state organizations such as Aemet or the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), which depend on the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, reported the magnitude of the damage late. The Catarroja judge investigating the flood has dismantled this principle in each order by refusing to indict those responsible for these organizations or the Government delegate in the Valencian Community, the socialist Pilar Bernabé.
until 8:28 p.m., 17 minutes after the alert was sent, the most important decision of the day. The magistrate maintains that if the notification had been sent earlier, the death toll would have been reduced. The instructor has also criticized that the message that was snuck into the phones did not refer to the need to go up to the first floors of the homes. Most of the 229 deceased lost their lives after being trapped in ground floors and garages.
