“I got up from the sofa to go get some water and when I returned, Óscar Puente had built me a detour on the A7 to allow traffic towards Valencia,” wrote Javier Durán (@tortondo) in X, one of the hundreds of comments and memes that recognize the management and communication work that the Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility is carrying out these days after the impact of DANA in Valencia.
The messages on the work of his ministry have concreteness, clarity, usefulness, recognition of workers and citizens and hope in the reconstruction and in the capacity of the State, the public, everyone, to overcome the tragedy. It has been almost an oasis of tranquility in the cacophony of voices and information from endless sources, of very different quality and reliability, which have overwhelmed us this week through social networks and the media, especially television. “The truth supported by data has been devalued,” writes sociologist and economist William Davies in his book Nervous States. If emotions have replaced reason in public conversations in normal situations, what won’t happen in times of crisis and disaster?
