EL ESPAÑOL has defended in previous editorials that now is not the time to engage in political battles. What is urgent now is not the sectarian fight in the media, but the cleaning and reconstruction of the areas devastated by the cold drop.
It will be time to clarify responsibilities.
The President of the Government indeed seems to agree with this newspaper when he asks “to be where we need to be” and to “learn our lesson”.
Even if in the case of Pedro Sanchez These statements reveal an obvious political interest; no one can deny the need for Spaniards to learn lessons from the passage of the cold drop in the Valencian Community.
This newspaper published yesterday, Tuesday, information which, perhaps, in other political times, would have provoked resignations. The one who Therese Ribera The adaptation and drainage works of the Poyo ravine were interrupted in 2021 for environmental reasons and after a cost-benefit calculation which, after what happened on October 29, proved fatal for 223 Spaniards and for tens of thousands of victims of the devastation.
The cost of the work was estimated in 2021 at around 200 million euros. The Union of Farmers and Breeders reported the same year that the unexecuted budget of the Ministries of Ecological Transition and Agriculture amounted to 1,660 million euros. In 2022 and 2023, the unexecuted budget added another 2.59 billion euros.
If there is a lesson to be learned from October 29, it is the immorality of doing a cost-benefit calculation. when the first is perfectly acceptable and the second is measured in hundreds of human lives saved.
Even if no one died during Dana, the cost of work in Poyo Ravine would be only a fraction of the immense amount of money that will need to be spent to rebuild the affected area and compensate victims.
“It will always be cheaper to invest in dams than to compensate for floods,” declared the FAES Foundation, chaired by Jose Maria Aznarin an article published yesterday Tuesday.
Another lesson to be learned is that sclerotic environmental legislation, often dictated by so-called experts with little contact with reality, ignoring the farmers and ranchers of the region, and with the sole objective of preserving an idealized vision of nature, endangers the lives of citizens. .
It is this naive vision of nature, more typical of an activist than of a politician who claims to be guided by scientific criteria, which led to a PSOE government, that of José Luis Rodriguez Zapateroto abandon in 2004 a National Hydrological Plan (PHN) which provided for the construction of a dam in Cheste and the restoration of the natural channels of the Torrente, Chiva, Pozalet and Poyo ravines.
The construction of this dam, as well as the drainage and reform of the Poyo ravine aborted by Minister Ribera, they would very likely have avoided the devastation caused by the cold snap of October 29.
It is also ironic that the devastation of a good part of the Valencian orchard was the practical result of green policies promoted, in theory, for the “global recovery of the Valencian orchard”.
The PSOE government has not been able to propose a reasonable alternative to the PHN which does not imply a refusal, for allegedly environmental reasons, of any type of human intervention on a nature which, from its point of view, should be kept in as close a condition as possible. , forgive the redundancy, in the state of nature.
If the catastrophe of October 29 showed anything, it is that the control and channeling of the unleashed forces of nature is not a matter of “lefts and rights”, but an imperative of reality.
If this government sincerely believed in climate change, it would be the first to recover the PHN or imagine a reasonable alternative. It is its refusal to negotiate a “water pact” with the PP that allows us to doubt the sincerity of this government’s belief in said climate change.
