The president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, wants to talk about the future. Of reconstruction. It is more difficult for him to explain, although he tried, what he did on October 29 when a historic DANA hit Valencian territory and cost the lives of 219 people and left 13 missing. But what he didn’t talk about were the months leading up to the disaster. Cuts in emergency services and the paralysis of all intervention plans put in place by the previous left-wing government of the Pacte del Botànic. Mazón’s same announcement about creating an emergency service reveals his previous policy on climate change during his first months as president.
Thus, according to the documentation consulted by elDiario.es, the Ministry of Justice and Interior froze for 16 months the four technician positions that Botànic had planned for the Emergency Analysis and Surveillance Unit. This unit, presented by former minister Gabriela Bravo in 2022, sought to organize a team of experts for decision-making in cases like the DANA of October 2024 and which would have been integrated into the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi ).
After the announcement of the creation of the unit, it was allocated financially in the budgets of the Generalitat for 2023. Concretely, 500,000 euros were allocated, among other things, for the hiring of the six specialists who were to train this unit (four analysis technicians and emergency surveillance, a section head and a unit head). During the presentation of the budgets to the Corts by Gabriela Bravo, the unit’s budgetary allocation was reported. Verónica Marcos, a PP deputy, criticized the measure as unnecessary. ” For what ? » he asked then-Advisor Bravo, calling the measure a “smokescreen.”
Once the 2023 budgets were approved, the List of Jobs (RPT) was modified to include the unit’s six new positions. During the Botànic period, two section and unit head positions were filled. When Carlos Mazón arrived at the Palau de la Generalitat, the Consell formed by the PP and Vox paralyzed both the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE) and the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit.
With this device, equipped with expert personnel, “we will be better prepared and will have the latest technologies to improve the response to fires and other major disasters”, explained Minister Bravo at the time during the presentation of the unit .
Indeed, the decree creating the UVE established the obligation to launch the analysis unit to anticipate the danger based on vulnerability to different types of emergencies and their possible evolution, by proposing possible emergency measures. protection for the population, infrastructure and vulnerable areas. And this also involved integrating the data with existing risk analysis mapping.
For this reason, it was “necessary” to have a software tool to predict the behavior of meteorological and hydrological risks, as indicated by the Deputy Director General of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, in the specifications for the computer program . However, the Mazón executive took 10 months to formalize the allocation of the “software” intended for the Valencian Security and Emergency Response Agency, as reported by this newspaper.
The “software” was not operational in DANA
In fact, the contract was finally made official on October 26, three days before the catastrophic DANA. Due to the enormous delay in formalizing the attribution, the computer program for forecasting the behavior of meteorological and hydrological risks was not operational on October 29, when DANA devastated several regions of the province of Valencia.
It only took the Mazón government five months to eliminate the UVE project launched by his predecessor, the socialist Ximo Puig, also calling it a “chiringuito”. The creation of the UVE, in addition to the “software” that was not operational during the DANA disaster, also meant the creation of the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit, today recovered by Mazón.
“This unit was created to provide information to those responsible for managing any type of crisis derived from the climate emergency, a team that will monitor the risks of forest fires or emergencies of meteorological origin to collaborate with the emergency services in anticipation. of the behavior of these phenomena and the analysis of the critical scenarios that they generate,” explained Gabriela Bravo.
The Minister of Justice, the Interior and Public Administration at the time added that “the need to develop these planning, anticipation and intervention teams in the face of new major emergency scenarios” had been detected. The Mazón executive’s disastrous response to DANA proved him right too late.