On Saturday November 2, four days after the tragedy in Valencia, Carlos Mazón announced what he considered an excellent idea. Faced with those who demand that the government of Pedro Sánchez take control of the emergency, including the Popular Party, the Valencian president presents the creation of five committees to manage the crisis caused by DANA. All would be chaired by advisors from their government and would have seven ministers under their command: Puente, Díaz, García, Marlaska, Bustinduy, Cuerpo and Rodríguez.
Teresa Ribera, vice-president and minister of ecological transition, does not appear anywhere on this list. This will surprise no one. During the first week after the disaster, the PP paid practically no attention to Ribera. Critics focus on Sánchez. Suddenly, in the storm of ideas that arose in the party to find a culprit other than Mazón, someone remembers that the vice-president must submit to a vote in Brussels, like the rest of the future commissioners of the Commission European.
Ribera becomes public enemy number one of the PP. The slogan is clear. While party leaders anonymously tell some media outlets that Mazón is more dead than alive, in public the message is different. The attacks must focus on Ribera so that we talk as little as possible about the Valencian president.
Mazón’s five crisis committees, made up of seven ministers, never heard back. No meetings were called and the aforementioned ministers did not bother to ask questions about them. As an idea, it was not necessary, even if it was much better than having spent three hours with a journalist on October 29, to offer her the position of president of the regional radio and television.
Despite the risk of overthrowing the entire government of Ursula Von der Leyen, the PP managed to freeze the confirmation process of commissioners in the European Parliament a week ago. Génova says he is very optimistic about his chances of ending Ribera’s European career before it begins. The European PP cannot boycott Von der Leyen, but it takes the opportunity so that the social democrats must swallow the names of two extreme right-wingers, the Italian Raffaele Fitto and the Hungarian Olivér Várhelyi.
This Wednesday was the day when the two movements converged. Teresa Ribera appeared in Congress and in Brussels it was necessary to define the situation in favor or against the vice president. It was even said that everything depended on the performance of Ribera in the parliamentary seat, whom the PP had suddenly chosen as the incarnation of all its errors, even if the most important decisions had been taken by Carlos Mazón on October 29.
Ribera is responsible for two public bodies that have performed exceptionally well during the crisis, AEMET and the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar. The most relevant part of his speech was when he detailed the information that was provided to the Generalitat, notably on the afternoon of the 29th. The latest version from the Valencian government is that the Confederation spent several hours without inform Cecopi, the committee, of what was happening. anything. of crisis. Ribera denied this with a detailed timeline.
“There was never a blackout of information,” he said. The Confederation updates the information received every five minutes on its website. Between 4:26 p.m. and 8:12 p.m., send nine email messages warning of record heavy rainfall on the Poyo Rambla, onto which excess river flow will eventually spill. Seven of them occurred between 4:26 p.m. and 6:43 p.m., when the Generalitat claims to be acting blindly.
Curiously, this is the moment when Mazón has lunch with a journalist in a sparsely covered restaurant and when Minister Salomé Pradas repeatedly leaves the Cecopi meeting, which started at 5 p.m., to try to contact its president.
There are other advisories related to wetlands. At 4:55 p.m., the Confederation announced that flows of more than a thousand cubic meters per second are expected in the Magro River to prevent the dam from overflowing. A little over half an hour later, the Generalitat issued a hydrological alert warning of the risk of rivers overflowing. At 5:52 p.m., the Confederation warns that it is in scenario 1 in relation to the Forata dam. The situation worsens and at 6:05 p.m. we move to scenario 2 due to the risk of breakage or significant damage to the dam.
Ribera affirms that the President of the Confederation transmits this information to the Cecopi meeting, which he attends by videoconference. It seems completely logical that he would do this, because it is his function and it is impossible to think of what he will gain if he hides the information. The water flow to the tank reaches 2,000 cubic meters per second, which is twice the maximum safety level.
Ester Muñoz was the PP deputy chosen to attack Ribera. He did not dare to mention Mazón at any time in his first speech. It’s as if the Valencian president had not made any relevant decision that day. As Feijóo had done before, he declared in the second intervention that “Mr. Mazón was not obliged to be at Cecopi” in the face of socialist chatter. If this is the case, one must wonder why Mazón finally attended this meeting more than two and a half hours after it began. It was an excuse Mazón made a few days later.
Muñoz only wanted to talk about Ribera. “When the country needed her, she hid,” he accused. He claimed that engineering work – for which his ministry has the expertise – “would have prevented the flooding”, a highly questionable assumption, given the enormous waterfall figures. “These seven emails (from the Confederation) did not concern the flows, but the rain.”
The MP affirmed that the President of the Confederation “never said anything”. In this case, we would have to know why no one asked him anything. There was a lot of negligence that day, but not so much that no one questioned the head of the Confederation about the rainfall and flow rates in the basins he controls.
Inevitably, threats eventually appeared. There, Muñoz was somewhat confused. He speculated that if the fault lay with the Generalitat, the government delegate, present at the Cecopi meeting, “could have warned that they were putting the population in danger, but she did not do so.” This is a hypothesis based on the accusations against Mazón and which the PP is supposed to reject. It is enough that Muñoz already knows the legal result: “It is a possible classic fraud. I wish him luck in defending this in court.
Could it be that the PP also wants Ribera to end up in prison. From there, others will have to spring into action, like some Clean Hands plaintiffs and some judges addicted to the available hair style. There will be no shortage of candidates.
In Brussels, an agreement was reached on Wednesday between conservatives, social democrats and liberals to confirm the ratification of the entire Commission proposed by Von der Leyen, of which Ribera is a member. The scenario in which the European right would torpedo the coalition government it leads just to please Feijóo was pure fantasy.
Feijóo informed the PP barons that they could now become disillusioned. They can’t get rid of Mazón because he’s one of them and he has to try to climb out of the hole he’s in by making the rebuild a success. They are condemned to live with him, as if he were a corpse which currently gives off an unpleasant odor.
“People will not forgive Mazón no matter what he does,” one of the barons told El Mundo. They assume that Vox will benefit from this usury in the Valencian Community. The image of the PP leadership in regional governments, which Feijóo likes to talk about so much, is seriously damaged. The party needed to stone Ribera, even though it knows that it is another fantasy to think that it will save the Valencian president.
