A senior official in the Government of former Valencian President Carlos Mazón (2023-2025) has assured before the judge of Catarroja (Valencia) investigating the dana – the catastrophe that left 230 dead in 2024 – that the former Minister of Justice and the Interior, the investigated Salomé Pradas, warned him at the worst of the crisis about the possibility of a dam breaking. Cayetano García, who was regional secretary of the Presidency of the Generalitat during the flood, related this information to the instructor. “At 7:36 p.m., Pradas called me and told me that a dam was going to burst and that it had to be confined to the province of Valencia,” he explained, according to sources present at his appearance to EL PAÍS.
When Pradas reported this information to García, Mazón had just come out of his 37-minute period of incommunication (18:57-19:34) and the risk of breaking the Forata dam, an infrastructure in Yátova (Valencia) was on the table, the overflow of which could have caused 8,000 deaths, according to reports from the Generalitat.
García testifies this Thursday before magistrate Nuria Ruiz Tobarra as a witness, a condition that forces him to tell the truth. And he did it a week after delivering a notarial document to the court with his messages on the day of the misfortune with the regional leadership that managed the crisis. , this former senior official reported to Mazón before sending the massive alert to mobile phones. Before the judge, García stated that this assessment was not transmitted to him by Pradas, but rather that he “heard it on Cadena Ser.”
A member of Mazón’s hard core, García explained that, after Pradas’ call, he contacted the Generalitat’s lawyer to consult on the legal fit of a possible confinement. The witness, who was recalled by Mazón’s successor, Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca, as regional Secretary of Economy, has assured that the possibility of confinement was not conveyed to him by Mazón or by the former chief of staff during the flood, José Manuel Cuenca.
García’s appearance is part of the summons that the instructor agreed to among the six members of the hard core of the former president. These are senior officials who communicated with Mazón during the worst of the emergency, the afternoon in which the former head of the Consell remained incommunicado for 37 minutes after a lunch of almost four hours at the Valencian restaurant El Ventorro with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana.
