Every expert in crisis and disaster management knows that the most important thing to avoid falling on the brink of tragedy is prevention and information. Once inside, the most important thing to get out of the abyss is rapid response, good management and political stability. Valencia could not be further away eleven days after a flood swallowed up more than 200 lives in half an hour, knocked out 300,000 people and devastated an area equivalent to the city of Lugo.
The center of Valencia was bustling this Saturday and it wasn’t because of the shopping or the party. At four p.m., neighbors and columns of volunteers began marching toward the capital from ground zero, covered in mud. Along the way, a dull murmur passed through the open shops and terraces. Stories were told, social gatherings took place, anxieties were expressed. In the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, hand to hand, suppressed rage throbbed, facing the wall of silence in the face of misunderstood questions: “Why didn’t they warn? “Why didn’t they come sooner?” » “Why did they abandon us? A vein full of anger and sorrow that finally had a street to flow through. Eleven days of cleaning with brooms they bought themselves. Eleven days of providing food or diapers, surviving without electricity or water, cooking for the neighbors. Eleven days of looking for bodies, praying that the car would appear and maybe, inside, your father, your sister, your aunt.
To this disastrous management, we must add other salient facts. That the President of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, was unreachable on the Tuesday of the tragedy because of a frivolous meal, instead of being present for emergency checks; that the responsible advisor declared that she knew nothing about the ES Alert system until today; that another ordered the families of the missing to stay in the house they had lost to wait for news… The anger that manifested itself in Paiporta against the royal entourage was still encapsulated and exploded this Saturday at cry of the majority of “Mazón, resignation”, although there were also some banners against Sánchez and the politicians. The future scenario, currently with Mazón himself and his Consell at the helm, is unknown.
His entourage says that the president wants to last and considers the resignation of his two advisers as a ritual sacrifice to a people who have said enough, but who do not plan to leave. Feijóo withdrew his support. The mayor of Valencia does not know him when she meets him in the street. In his party, he has a group of loyalists and a political bureau of advisors. From there, Mazón stains. After the “private working lunch”, burn. The street, this historic Saturday vibrant with desolation and rage, with 130,000 demonstrators (the capital has 800,000 citizens), caught fire. After a peaceful process, at the last minute, some riots, firecrackers and police charges.
In the still unlikely event that he takes the protest into account and resigns, no member of his government could replace him, because none of them is a deputy, and the one who would be elected (with the mayor in the pool) would have to have the support or abstention of Vox. The option of elections in the midst of this tragedy is unthinkable. Staying in power, without the support of the party, without the support of the shameful daily headlines and without the indignation of the streets, is a way of the cross that interferes every day with the only important thing: helping people and solving the tragedy . “Would you trust this man to rebuild your home or would you stay calm if he was the one looking for your family? “, responds a man from Catarroja with a rhetorical question.
Psychologists who attended Ground Zero, accustomed to tragedies or violent events, say that when you are the victim of a road accident, the nervous system decompensates and is altered. When the ambulance, the police, arrives, he calms down, understands that the cure is coming and begins to return to his parameters. In Valencia there are cities where this ambulance has not yet arrived. The driver, with no points on his license, is tending to his own political emergency these days.
A group of stunned tourists wonder if there is football today: “No ma’am, there are deaths.” Young people with mud marks, stained boots held high, groups of elderly people, families. The popular army of volunteers who exchanged brooms for banners: “I am here for those who cannot come”, “Mazón à la Karcher”, “Mazón a la prison”, “Plorant de ràbia”, “Sánchez and Mazón, no olvido ni pardon. “Valencia lives Matter”, we read on a sweatshirt in some squares that cannot be filled with people who still do not understand how they folded their arms in the face of the worst floods. “Help,” another sign asks bluntly.
The Popular Party of the Valencian Community had the questionable idea of delegitimizing the protest because something Catalan. In reality, if there were so many, Valencia would have already carried out a process and become independent. Mazón took advantage of the afternoon to tweet all the achievements of the week, achievements that do not reach street level or arrive too slowly. As if their social networks could hide the shame of stumbling management: this Friday the first SMS of health precautions were sent to cell phones in Valencia, with cases of infection already under investigation and numerous infected wounds and open.
There are those looking for a borrowed house, those trying to dry up to ask for help, those with a garage full of cars and maybe a dead body, hair salons that can’t open, self-employed people who cannot work, hundreds of thousands of residents who cannot travel, because cars no longer exist in Horta Sud. Today, Albufera fishermen fish for corpses. “I am looking for the man who saved me, to save me I saw how the flood took him away.” Trauma, trauma and more trauma. “Mentre menjava, el poble s’ofegava,” they chanted in Mazón at the gates of the Palau de la Generalitat.
The street erupted with a cross-sectional protest which overwhelmed with the acronyms of those who organized it. Thousands of citizens declared this Saturday in the Consell that anyone who has carried out disastrous management must leave and cannot continue to command it, with the unknown abyss that this implies. The Coordination Center (Cecopi) is today more united, the army is much more deployed and fortunately it is self-managed. But Mazón reigns a lot and continues to be the political person responsible for the disaster and the one who promotes and approves the measures. Eleven days after the tragedy, daily life is still dominated by logistical problems. An emergency without pliers. A president in ambush. An unpredictable political situation. Valencia vibrates with rage, even if it gives hope to the volunteers and the primitive instinct for survival. “We need to get out of here.” Valencia has too many fronts. With a bout of mud, in the streets and another at the Palau de la Generalitat, he juggles in a circus with abysses in two rings.
