The driver who accompanied the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana Carlos Mazón on October 29, 2024 declared this Friday before the judge investigating the tragedy, Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, that when the massive mobile alert sounded to inform the population of the magnitude of the misfortune, at 8:11 p.m., the popular baron was still in the center of Valencia. “After picking up Mazón at the Palau de la Generalitat, we went to look for her press chief, who was in the Serrano Towers, in the heart of the city. The Es-Alert sounded when we had already picked her up,” a witness assured, according to sources present in his statement to EL PAÍS.
On the day of the cold drop, he said, he was mobilized to go to Cecopi, the autonomous body that managed the crisis in L’Eliana (Valencia), starting at 7:00 p.m. He then president He did not arrive at the Palau de la Generalitat until 8:00 p.m. For months, Mazón maintained that, after his four-hour lunch with journalist Maribel Vilaplana at the El Ventorro restaurant, he went to his Executive headquarters at 5:00 p.m. and, from there, he followed the evolution of Cecopi. “We went to refuel at approximately 7:00 p.m. Two vehicles left. I received a call from the secretary [de la Generalitat]. They ask me where I was and to come back, that we have to take the president to L’Eliana,” the driver said this Friday.
Eleven minutes after the entourage of the ex-president pheading to the crisis body, Cecopi made the most relevant decision of the day, the sending of Es-Alert, the massive alert to mobile phones that was sent when the majority of the missing had already died. The judge maintains that the notification arrived late and poorly and that, if it had been activated sooner, lives would have been saved.
The driver remembered what the Dana’s day was like. That day, he picked up Mazón at 8:40 at his house. Afterwards, they went to the Generalitat, where the then president He participated in three events. During the morning, they did not talk about the emergency. During these journeys, the witness has said he is unaware of the calls the man made or received. president. “I was watching the traffic,” he said. “I was not paying attention to the conversations,” added this employee, whose day ended after midnight, when he took the leader to his home in the center of Valencia.
The witness has authorized the judge to check his phone number and thus prove the exact time he received the call to go to the Cecopi or pick up Mazón at the Palau de la Generalitat. His statement takes place 10 days after the statement of the three bodyguards who accompanied Mazón on the day of the flood and who dismantled the argument that the popular man has maintained for more than a year. The security personnel then stated that the politician did not disembark at his Executive headquarters until 7:50 p.m.—not 5:00 p.m.—.
Mazón, after attending a four-hour lunch at El Ventorro, accompanied journalist Maribel Vilaplana to a central parking lot in Valencia to pick up her car. Afterwards, he went to L’Eliana to join the device that managed the crisis. It arrived at 8:28 p.m., 17 minutes after the alert was sent and after the overflowing of the Poyo ravine, the genesis of the misfortune, flooding municipalities such as Paiporta (28,136 inhabitants) or Catarroja (30,604), where the flood left 55 and 25 dead, respectively.
