The “self-criticism” that Carlos Mazón announced this Friday at the start of his appearance in the Valencian newspaper Las Corts was similar to that to which candidates for office, when asked what their main fault is, respond with theatrical sadness : “I’m too much of a perfectionist. » or “I am very demanding. » The Valencian president’s self-criticism regarding his performance before DANA was that he had done it very well, too well, but that everything failed because from the outside – see AEMET and the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar, agencies dependent, of course, on central government – they did badly. According to his account, the tragedy which left 215 dead and 16 missing is the result of a confluence of causes: the unprecedented scale of the natural phenomenon, the lack of information on the part of state entities and the “failures of the system ” in general. Everything conspired to consummate the catastrophe. Everything, except his incompetence and that of his government.
I am not going to go into the list of data provided by Mazón during his marathon, his lies, omissions and inaccuracies, which my colleagues in this newspaper have already dealt with wisely. What I wish to highlight is the audacity with which he evaded accountability, being, by law, the person most responsible for emergency management in his community. No matter how many milongas it organizes, AEMET declared a red alert for the DANA in Valencia early in the morning of October 29 and, despite the fact that the waters reduced their flow for several hours, it maintained this maximum alert throughout the day. . It is false that there was a lack of information, as he declared during his appearance: in addition to the AEMET data, the General Directorate of Traffic published in its X account nearly 80 opinions of landslides, floods and dragged cars and the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar sent by email at least 194 notices regarding DANA to the Emergency Coordination Center of the Valencian Community, as revealed elDiario.es. All that was missing was someone to hit Mazón to make him react.
