Not a well-documented carefully-written piece, but a stream of personal thoughts, written in frustration, rage and impotence at what we've seen this week.
Tuesday's (29/10/2024) rainfall and flash floods in the Valencia region were horrendous. But foreseen; with accurate data and warnings from the weather service published and broadcast on TV/radio throughout the day. Knowing how much water had fallen in the mountains upstream, they had a very close idea of how much water would flow through the (normally dry) ravines that towns have been built around and what height the water would reach as it raged through streets and homes. By mid-afternoon/early evening they knew it was going to be a nightmare and called for immediate action. All this data and warnings were passed on to the local authorities who have to decide what action to take.
However, the local authorities (the Valencian autonomous government) failed to act in time; they
failed to emit the official warning from the government (the most efficient system sends an audible alarm and message to all mobile phones in the area) in time for people to go home or stay
indoors which would have allowed/forced shops and factories to close, and
people to realize the seriousness of what was about to happen in a question of
hours. They sent the warning too late, losing valuable hours, when the floods had already hit most
places and most of the victims had probably already been washed away or were
trapped in places where they had little chance of survival. Yes, this level of
rainfall and flooding surely meant chaos and deaths whatever, but on what
scale? Perhaps, with the correct warnings and emergency measures that 21st
century technology and up-to-the-minute scientific data offer, we could have
been looking at a dozen dead if we compare to similar cases around Europe? Who
knows. Now, we're looking at least two hundred according to the latest update (Saturday 2 Nov). If they had sent the warning mid-afternoon or even an hour or two earlier than it was broadcast, there would still have been enormous flood damage but many, many lives would have been saved as people got to safety in time.
Throughout the night Tues-Wed, the scale of the catastrophe was becoming clear
even for those of us just following social media. Hundreds of cries for help
from people trapped, injured, up trees, on car roofs, with the water (and
bodies) raging past, people who'd been unable to hold on to their loved ones,
people trapped in underground areas filling up with water and so on. Cries for help on social media as the emergency telephone lines were completely overrun and undermanned (the service had been privatized to save money).
The post-flood response by politicians has also been hopeless; too slow and too
little. Apart from whatever rescues could go on during the long night, by daybreak Wednesday they must have been able to appreciate the magnitude
of the tragedy, and the amount of immediate rescue and recovery work needed. There should have been many helicopters (military and emergency services) in constant action, searching for people and bringing in food, water and whatever was needed, and hundreds of
rescuers on the ground, and asap, calls to organize the arrival of several thousands of Spain's hardly-used military
troops to come and start the clear-up, not the couple of hundred who were apparently moving. The immediate response was on nowhere near the scale needed. Nor was the response in the following days as the regional government - in charge of the operation - seemed to be inoperative or unwilling to accept the dimensions of the catastrophe.
Just yesterday, Saturday, 4 days later, there were still people without food, water,
medicine or a roof over their head. People who still hadn't seen Spanish
emergency services in their town or the famous mass arrival of troops. People literally still
trapped in their homes as they have 3 feet of mud and a heap of wrecked cars
piled up against their house. And we're talking about towns 10 or 20 km from
the third biggest city in Spain, not trying to reach the crashed plane in Alive! Volunteers, on foot with sweeping brushes and shovels and local farmers with tractors have carried out most of the clean-up in these first days, or been bringing in bags and trolleys of food and medicine while offical help and aid has been way too short on the ground.
There'll probably be major health problems in the making too with contaminated water everywhere -
sewage, petrol, chemicals, dead bodies decomposing.
Dead bodies are still to be found and recovered from piles of cars, basements,
ground floor buildings, underpasses, underground carparks, those washed out to sea... The death toll is
currently over 200 but the fears are it could be many more. For this
reason, perhaps the local govt refused to offer any new data yesterday, for
fear of people's reactions and protests if we know the true numbers?
For the first few days there has been no attempt (at least that I know of) to provide centres in every affected town
offering psychological help and support for all survivors and relatives of
victims/the missing, just the bare minimum for those few who have received the official information that they've lost a loved one.
There have been restrictions in some areas on the tens of thousands of volunteers who've marched from
Valencia city to help every day. Supposedly because they might get in the way.
In the way of what, if there's been little happening in many of the places the volunteers have reached? Or perhaps the
restrictions are to try and cut off the flow of videos and photos showing just
how dramatic the catastrophe is?
Actually this is not just my personal opinion based simply on watching the news and social media and listening to testimonies on the ground, but ties in with that of many experts and people with experience in emergencies. They're all saying the local government is/was ill-prepared and did not act swiftly enough with the data they were given on Tuesday afternoon and failed to organize a sufficient response in the following days.
Next will come the inevitable cover-up of the mistakes and negligence, alongside political blame-passing on a scale never seen before.
Then will come the phase that those who think they'll avoid jail (or Hell) are
waiting for: sharing out the aid and recovery funds. Remember the earthquake in
1980 near Naples (as mentioned in Ferrante's My Beautiful Friend book)? Of the
40 billion which was supposed to help, it sounds like (wikipedia) only about 1/4 of the
money, 9 billion, was actually used for real aid and victims; the rest was
pocketed by corruption*
>Footnote: regarding one of the Valencian government's politicians "in charge" of emergency
services; all we know of his agenda for Tuesday (with weather services offering
constant warnings) is he had a 'working lunch' with a bull-fighting
association. Nothing was heard of him then till on Friday when he tweeted a
photo saying he'd been straight into work at 11 o'clock (sic) on Wednesday to deal
with the emergency. It has turned out too (since writing the first version of this), that the President of the regional government himself was at a private 'lunch' and out of reach on the Tuesday of the catastrophe and didn't turn up at the emergency meeting (called at 17.30 but inoperative as no one really grasped what was happening or wanted to take a decision) until 19.00.
[*we'll leave for another day the
levels of corruption, bribery and ignorance which led to the decades of
barely-regulated urban planning behind this disaster]
