The Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, has acknowledged that the Ministry of Ecological Transition is also “obliged to give answers” about questions such as why years later no works have been carried out to mitigate the flood risks identified, for example, to divert the channel of the Poyo ravine that ended up flooding towns like Paiporta or Alfafar, and has postponed for later the “analysis” of who did what with the information on the flooding of the channels and weather forecasts in Valencia that the various administrations had available on October 29, which, he said, “everyone must take responsibility”, including himself.
“It is convenient not to anticipate conclusions at this time in relation to the analysis of how they acted and what information was available, we will probably have to evaluate it in a later process.” Then, he added that “everyone will have to assume their responsibilities, starting with the speaker”.
Thus, the number two of Vice President Teresa Ribera in environmental matters, responsible for agencies such as the AEMET and the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar (CHJ), has not shunned a possible responsibility for the data that both provided to the Valencian authorities in the hours before the DANA devastated the province of Valencia. He has done so during his appearance this Wednesday in the Ecological Transition Commission of Congress in which, at questions from the PP, he has reaffirmed that the data on the growth of the channels and weather forecasts were sufficient for institutions such as the Diputación de Valencia or the University of Valencia to cancel activities and suspend classes and, he said, the same as those with which the regional government of Carlos Mazón decided not to launch the alert to the public until after 20 hours.
“I have to tell you objectively that with the same information, in the same territory and at the same times, there were administrations that activated their emergency protocols at a very early hour and others who did it at a later time,” he has responded to the Valencian deputy of the PP Joaquín Melgarejo. “If there is something in an emergency management that allows a subsequent and calm analysis and reach the ultimate consequences are the data, because everything is recorded, there is a time sequence in which you know what was done at all times,” said the Secretary of State.
Like Mazón this Monday, Melgarejo has insisted that the CHJ did not properly inform the Consell, neither in the meeting of the Coordination Center that afternoon and that, when it did, almost at 19 hours to warn of a risk of overflow, it was simply with an email that was lost among a hundred others.
“Don’t you think that the seriousness of the data forced an extraordinary communication, that there should have been a call to those responsible for the Generalitat?”, Melgarejo asked Morán, before whom he accused the AEMET of having met on October 29 with “all the administrations of the State without the Generalitat”, something that the Secretary of State has denied. As he said, the Emergency Coordination Center (CECOPI) “is a meeting between the General Administration of the State alone. Who calls is the Valencian Community through the competence that has and meets at five in the afternoon and there are responsible for the regional administration of the State,” said Moran, who has returned to confront that, as argued by Mazon and today the deputy Melgarejo, the president of the CHJ “said nothing there” of the flooding of the channel that already detected the data. That meeting that began at five in the afternoon, Moran has assured, “is the time when the president of the CHJ transferred the risk, the first information that is transferred is in the CECOP”, not in the last mail that was sent to the Generalitat, at 18.43 hours to warn of a flood to loa 2,282 m3 / s in the ravine of Poyo.
Faced with the claims against the existence of climate change by Vox and calls from ERC or Sumar to do more against it, the PP deputies have focused their interventions on highlighting the responsibilities of Morán and Vice President Ribera in “negligence” related to the DANA, in their environmentalist approach in the cleaning of rivers and unrealized works designed to reduce the risk of flooding in the province of Valencia. Morán has been much less belligerent on these issues, which he has admitted and on which he has promised a “reflection” by his department.
On Ribera, the popular deputies have reproached on several occasions that the vice president is “missing” and that “has not deigned to set foot in the Comunitat Valenciana”.
“Explanations” on the competences of the Ministry
“Is it true that Mrs. Ribera and you are the most responsible for the management of the hydraulic domain and the maintenance of the channels and hydraulic infrastructures necessary to protect the population from climatic events and the most responsible for the AEMET and hydrological information systems responsible for preventing water avenues?” Melgarejo has asked him, who has especially stressed the policy of “minimum intervention” for the cleaning of riverbeds of which the Ministry of Ecological Transition informed the Congress a few years ago through its response to a written question.
“I will not remove a comma from the intervention he has made because it is understandable at this time that any Valencian citizen what he is looking for are answers,” said Morán to all these questions. “We are all obliged to give answers,” he insisted.
Works projected but not done
One of the competences of the Ministry was to have carried out various projects designed to minimize the risk of flooding diagnosed by the Hydrographic Confederation itself in areas such as the Poyo and La Saleta ravines, which on Tuesday last week ended up overflowing and sweeping away dozens of Valencian towns. Morán has recognized it and has linked the lack of budget to carry them out.
“If the ravine of La Saleta or the Sellent dam had been conditioned, if those works had been executed, would have avoided at least part of the tragedy?”, asked the PP deputy César Sánchez, who has reproached Morán that “he has not given any explanation about the hydraulic infrastructures projected for years, which were known to be necessary and have not been executed”. “How do we explain to business neighbors who have seen how with the stroke of a pen absolutely everything disappeared that the Ministry of you and Ribera have not made the necessary infrastructure?” he has insisted.
Morán has quantified in “thousands and thousands” of projects of this type that pass from one plan to another “over time”, worth “thousands and thousands of millions of euros” for which historically there have not been sufficient resources, in something that has happened to him and his predecessors, also of the PP, who have been forced to choose the works that could be done based on a risk that, for example, in the case of the Poyo ravine was evaluated well below what was the reality.