The images are dramatic. The flood that hit the city of Valencia and its province in the south-west has caused over 100 victims, not counting the number of missing people, of which the Spanish authorities still have no idea how many there may be. And while the mud is being shoveled and the streets are cleared of the carcasses of cars dragged away by the uncontainable fury of the water, controversy breaks out. «The Civil Protection alerted the population when there were already flooded centers», headlines the centre-right newspaper El Mundo. “The alarm to the population was launched by the Generalitat eight hours after the rain began to make the rivers flood”, relaunches the rival El Pais.
The classic exchange of responsibility takes place between the national institutions, which depend on the government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez, and the local ones of the Valencian Community of the governor Carlos Mazón (Popular Party). The General Directorate of Civil Protection of the Ministry of the Interior had already issued a statement on 28 October warning of the risk of very intense rain, strong winds and thunderstorms in some southern areas of Spain.

AEMET, the national meteorological service, launched the red alert at 7.31 on Tuesday morning, October 29, and at 11.44 it warned: «Attention! In many areas of the coast it is not raining or the precipitation is light, but the rivers reach the coast in floods and we need to be on alert.” The newspaper Las Provincias reports that the situation was already apocalyptic before 6pm, with the flooding of the rivers taking away everything that was on the streets, including people.

The local administration, the Generalitat, however, sent the alert text message to residents’ cell phones only at 8pm when the disaster had already been underway for hours, with a 36 minute delay before alerting the Military Emergency Unit . Furthermore, the emergency number 112 (a service managed by a private company) collapsed immediately due to the sudden large flow of requests for help between Tuesday and Wednesday.
Since 2023, the ES-Alert system has existed in Spain which authorizes the emergency coordination centers of the seventeen Autonomous Communities to send alert text messages to all mobile phones active in the affected areas. The system allows the Spanish Civil Protection to immediately launch mass messages. But something didn’t work. And now the finger is being pointed at the governor of the PP Mazón who, as soon as he was elected in July 2023, closed the Valencian Emergency Unit established by the previous president of the Valencian Community belonging to a Psoe-Podemos-Compromis coalition.
In short, the efficient Spain, which consists of modern and well-functioning structures, this time has gone sensationally haywire, whether for ideological reasons or genuine inefficiency, the disaster is apocalyptic.