The Minister of Justice and Interior, Salomé Pradas, on whom the Generalitat’s Emergency Department depends, learned the same day at 8 p.m. from DANA that the Generalitat had a massive alert system to communicate notices to all citizens and in which they asked. to avoid any type of travel.
He admitted this in an interview with À Punt, in which he explained that he received a call at 8 p.m. from the Secretary of State for Ecological Transition, Hugo Morán, of Colombia, to warn him that he could not guarantee that the dam would not break. . of Forata on the Magre river. “That’s when a technician informed us that there was a mechanism called ES-Alert,” he says.
The massive alert was launched 12 minutes later, at 8:12 p.m., when the floods were already inundating several municipalities with several meters of water. The Ministry of the Interior and Justice explains that after this telephone interview “and after deliberation and agreement within Cecopi, (with telematic presence of the Government Delegation, the CHJ, the Civil Guard and the Police National and personal assistance of the Generalitat, Provincial Delegation of Valencia and UME), it was decided to send the massive message to the population, which arrives at 8:11 p.m.
Pradas states in this interview that when they inform them about the ES-Alert system, they emphasize that “it is not regulated at the moment, that it is not in our regional plans, that it is “It’s still a project that is in the National”. Civil Protection Committee to approve. But the previous government of the Generalitat of Ximo Puig presented this massive alert system in 2022, and in May 2023, The same Botanical Government has already carried out a dress rehearsal in the Vega Baja region.
After this alarm message, on October 30, another massive message was sent asking the population to avoid traveling, and on the 31st there was another SMS for the province of Castellón and another for Valencia asking the people to stay at home and take refuge in the heights. , and do not drive on the roads. The same system was used by the Catalan government on November 4 due to the episode of torrential rains.
