Carlos Mazón had already lied in 2019, when he was president of the Provincial Council of Alicante, on behalf of DANA which devastated the Vega Baja region. The then president of the provincial institution accused a senior official of the Hydrographic Confederation of Segura (CHS) of having arrived “three hours” late to the meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) to face to this emergency. However, as elDiario.es learned from reliable sources, Mazón’s statement was “downright false.”
The CHS Water Commissioner was in Almoradí to supervise the work of plugging the broken channel of the Segura River. And it was not even a meeting of Cecopi that was convened but of the Municipal Center for Operational Coordination (Cecopal). The senior official did not arrive “three hours” late but rather “20 or 30 minutes”, since the meeting had been called “with very little notice” and the person in question was on the ground in the river Segura.
During a plenary session of the Provincial Council of Alicante, held on October 2, 2019, Mazón said: “We want to know everything that happened.” This DANA left three people dead and devastated the Vega Baja region. Unlike the disaster of October 29, Cecopi had been summoned two days before and the emergency response forecasts were much more agile.
At that time, the regional government was in the hands of the Pacte del Botànic, chaired by the socialist Ximo Puig, and the regional emergency secretary was José María Ángel. Mazón, for his part, led the opposition from his position as president of the Alicante Provincial Council.
“Six days before, we already knew that a DANA was going to arrive,” criticized Carlos Mazón during this plenary session of the Provincial Council of Alicante. The president of the provincial institution at the time also proposed to finance, with public money from the Provincial Council (as his intervention shows), the complaints of the irrigators of Vega Baja against the CHS. “My predisposition is absolute,” he said in reference to the complaints that he planned to finance with the legal services of the Provincial Deputation of Alicante.
As many as 17 communities of irrigators in Vega Baja have denounced CHS President Mario Urrea and his predecessors in office since 2014 for alleged crimes of reckless imprudence that resulted in death and devastation. The debates were finally archived.
Mazón’s criticism after DANA has become a boomerang that squarely calls into question his disastrous handling of the current disaster, which has left 221 dead and eight missing. The Valencian president arrived two and a half hours late to the Cecopi meeting on October 29, DANA day, after having extended a meal with a journalist (private or professional agape, according to the multiple and contradictory versions of the Palau de la Generalitat ).
In another intervention, related to the Bejís fire in 2022, Mazón also assured that the emergency protocols were “perfectly clear”. Exactly the opposite of what he maintains today.
