Europe

Spanish official blames flood alert failure on Madrid, not his long lunch

Head of Valencia regional government spent three hours with a journalist on day emergency alerts were sent out late

A person raises a sign reading '20:12 [warning] very late! Mazón to prison' as dozens of protesters gather outside the Valencia parliament, where regional leader Carlos Mazón was speaking, on Friday. Photograph: José Jordán/AFP via Getty Images
A person raises a sign reading '20:12 [warning] very late! Mazón to prison' as dozens of protesters gather outside the Valencia parliament, where regional leader Carlos Mazón was speaking, on Friday. Photograph: José Jordán/AFP via Getty Images
Barney Jopson in Madrid and Andy Bounds in Brussels
Fri Nov 15 2024 - 17:23

The Spanish regional leader under fire for taking a long lunch break on the day catastrophic floods hit Valencia has claimed that an “information blackout” linked to the government in Madrid was to blame for delays in sending out emergency alerts.

Carlos Mazón said he “will not deny failings” in how the authorities handled the disaster. But the head of Valencia’s regional government did not mention his three-hour lunch with a journalist and instead blamed deficient reporting by a river basin authority overseen by one of prime minister Pedro Sánchez’s ministers.

Mr Mazón spoke on Friday more than two weeks after devastating floods killed more than 220 people, wrecked homes and businesses, and underlined the lethal threat of extreme weather linked to climate change. Most of the victims died in towns on the outskirts of the city of Valencia and 16 people are still missing.

Criticism has been heaped on the Valencia government, which is led by the conservative People’s party (PP), for failing to send emergency alerts to mobile phones until after 8pm on the day of the floods – nearly 13 hours after the state weather agency warned of “very intense” rain.

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Mr Mazón, who has faced calls for his resignation and sparred with Mr Sánchez over the crisis, said that denying errors “would imply that we haven’t learnt anything”. But he gave no indication he would quit and sought to change the narrative in an address to the Valencian legislature on Friday.

He said the main failure was “fragmented, inaccurate and late” information provided by the river basin authority about the thundering Poyo river, whose overflowing caused the greatest damage.

“It is legitimate to ask whether all the actors involved in the emergency had sufficient information in time and in a form that enabled them to apply protocols that had worked in other situations,” he said.

He spoke of a “two-and-a-half hour information blackout” until 6.43pm when the river basin authority finally sent an email to Valencia’s emergency committee about a “brutal” surge in the level of the Poyo river.

Mr Mazón’s lunch with a female journalist finished, according to local media, at 6pm, when some towns and villages were already swamped and several missing people had been reported.

He did not mention the lunch explicitly, but said: “I stuck to my agenda fully aware of the situation.”

But a government official in Madrid said that while Mr Mazón was at lunch, the river basin authority sent 62 automated emails to Valencia’s emergency managers about the unusually high water levels. The official questioned whether Mr Mázon’s team was on top of the messages or capable of interpreting them.

Mr Mazón claimed that the last message from the authority before the “blackout” said that water levels were falling in the Poyo river. He added that the head of the authority, Miguel Polo, dialled into a key emergency committee meeting that began at 5pm, but “said nothing” about the surge. Mr Mazón did not arrive at the meeting until after 7pm.

The authority is overseen by the environment ministry run by Teresa Ribera, a senior member of Mr Sánchez’s government who is likely to become the top Socialist in the new European Commission.

The furore in Spain has spread to Brussels with conservatives holding up the formation of a new commission. The European People’s Party, the largest group in the EU assembly and which includes the Spanish PP, has said it will not approve Ms Ribera before she is due to appear in the Spanish parliament on Wednesday. In return, the Socialists are refusing to approve five other commissioner candidates – potentially causing delays to Ursula von der Leyen’s new team, which was expected to take office on December 1st.

In Spain’s decentralised system, regional governments lead disaster management, but rely on information from river basin authorities and the state weather agency overseen by the central government.

The government official in Madrid said the river basin authority’s role was to “provide information, objective data”. The official added: “It is then the [Valencia regional] authorities who issue warnings, based on the objective data supplied.”

Joan Baldoví, head of the opposition party Compromis in the Valencian parliament, said Mr Mazón should have resigned, adding that he “has repeatedly lied to the Valencian people”. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024