DANA is already gone more than 200 dead in eastern Spain, particularly in the province of Valencia. The Generalitat Valenciana sent the alert at eight o’clock in the afternoon, when it had already been raining for several hours, despite the warning from AEMET the day before.
Pierre Arcosdirector of the Emergency and Disaster Research Unit at the University of Oviedo, explains in laSexta Noticias that it took too long to alert citizens of the risk: “The international standard for this type of flood is between one and two hours to alert. in 12 hours, the population did not have time to protect themselves“.
“Messages must be clear, short, credible and repeated. We must do exercises and tests, and They must arrive while giving the population time to protect themselves.which was not the case,” he adds.
Additionally, he explains that protocols should be established to prevent people from having to go to work when these disasters occur: “We need to change this thing about going to work with a red alert. “We are facing an extreme phenomenon which, due to climate change, will become more frequent in Spain.”
“To deal with this type of disaster, we need to change the chip, we need to increase the level of preventive response instead of giving a reactive response,” says Pedro Arcos.
