Spain's Weather Office Sent Red Alert For Valencia Province At 7:36 AM; Valencia Gov Sent Cell Phone Alert After 8:00 PM
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While much of the debate has split along familiar political lines, a timeline of Tuesday’s events reveals when key decisions were, and weren’t, taken. A little before 11pm on Monday 28 October, the Spanish met office, Aemet, issued orange and red weather alerts for parts of Valencia. At 7.36am the next morning, it updated its alerts in the region and by 9.41am, the entire province of Valencia was on red alert, with people warned of “extreme danger” in some areas and urged to keep away from rivers, gullies and flood-prone lowlands. At midday, Aemet released a video asking people to stay put.
As the severity of the floods became apparent, the central government’s representative in Valencia cancelled her agenda and called the region’s interior minister three times between noon and 2pm, offering help and resources. About 1pm on Tuesday, Valencia’s PP regional president, Carlos Mazón, was recorded on video saying that the rains were moving away and would ease up in Valencia by the early evening. A video of his forecast was later removed from his account on X.
According to Spanish media reports, Mazón had a long lunch with a journalist until about 6pm. He arrived at the emergency command centre at about 7.30pm, where he was brought up to speed on the state of the floods.
The Valencian government, which maintains control of the emergency, did not request the deployment across the entire region of the Spanish armed forces Military Emergencies Unit (UME) until after 8pm on Tuesday, about the time the civil protection alert was finally issued. On Thursday last week, the region’s interior minister told Valencian TV that she only found out about the mobile alert technology after a phone call from the central government’s environment ministry.
Mazón has responded to criticisms by seeking to blame Spain’s socialist government and even the UME. But sources in the administration of prime minister Pedro Sánchez are adamant it did everything it could to warn of the disaster and is doing everything in its power to alleviate its aftermath within the constraints of a highly decentralised state.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/10/spain-floods-valencia-political-fallout-government