Valencia Floods And The Grim Toll Of An Every-Man-For-Himself Mindset

-Analysis-

The death toll in Valencia continues to climb, far beyond 200. It could become Spain’s record number of deaths due to a natural disaster in the last 80 years.

Did anyone know what would happen? Five days earlier, scientists from the State Meteorological Agency AEMET were already indicating that the situation was increasingly alarming. They even correctly predicted the maximum rainfall and its location. They were very precise. I’d been following it on Twitter. A day before the rain, TV news channels had already warned that the Levante area was in extreme danger, marking with red, the highest on the scale of risk.

But yet it seems that, despite these warnings on the news and social media, a significant part of the population did not feel concerned. Furthermore, the highest authority in civil protection, the Generalitat, failed miserably. I am sure that the level of responsibility of each one in this catastrophe will eventually come to light.

On October 29, Carlos Mazón, head of Valencian regional government, publicly announced around 6 p.m. that the worst of the storm had already passed, just when the damage was greatest. And it was not until later, at 8 p.m., that the state of alarm was declared. This warning means that people should stay home and everyone should abandon work or any academic activities and protect themselves, and must not go to get their cars in garages. This should be communicated on mobile phones and by the security forces, like authorities do in the United States when a hurricane approaches.

I firmly believe that the delay in declaring a state of alarm is not so much a matter of great incompetence as of ideology, of misunderstood market-driven ideology.

Cold drops, climate change

“Alarmism should not be spread among citizens because the circumstances are not proven,” some think. But once they were proven, it was already too late.

The right and the far right see it as an intrusion into the freedom of individuals when a message arrives on their mobile phone saying: “Stay at home, lock yourself in, protect yourself and, above all, don’t take your car out of the parking lot.”

The hysterical reaction could already be observed when emergency drills were carried out with universal text messages on mobile phones in Madrid.

Another striking fact is that many of the deaths seem to have occurred in areas that are theoretically not prone to flooding and where it did not rain. The obvious reaction to this is to think it is necessary to review the criteria for flooding, because cold drops will become more frequent and more devastating because of climate change, which both causes the warming of the sea – up to 90°F – and makes it easy for cold drops to descend from the Arctic.

Why do Valencians have so many cars?

However, had the warning procedures been carried out correctly, we would still be facing a considerable number of deaths. “The accumulation of wrecked cars in Valencia is the living image of a space articulated around private transport,” wrote JV Boira in an article in La Vanguardia.

We need public policies in organizing a balanced model of life that protects us from climate change

And this is the central question. The disaster in Valencia, and in its metropolitan area where 1.6 million people live, is the reflection of a great failure, the result of the lack of public policies in organizing a sustainable and balanced model of life that protects us from the growing danger caused by climate change.

Why do Valencians have so many cars? In addition to the fact that for many the car is still an aspirational good, the main reason is probably because its public transport network is not up to par, with no possibility of improving to first class in the next decade.

Half of the scarce Renfe commuter network is still single track, so I’ll let you imagine the frequencies. Furthermore, what the Valencian authorities call metro is one very long railway system, with very low frequency and large sections with a single track. This is something completely different from the metros you can see around Europe. The tramway network is important, but it lacks metropolitan logic.

In the suburban area of Valencia, outside of the capital, getting around by public transport is frankly difficult. The underlying message the Valencian authorities have been communicating during the 45 years of democracy is “buy a car, don’t be a loser.” While Barcelona, Madrid and Bilbao have built amazing public transport networks, Valencia did not do its homework and fell far behind – as did Seville.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that while in Barcelona, half of households do not own a car, and in Paris those who are not interested in owning one has already reached 90%, in Valencia and its suburbs, the majority of the population considers the car as an element of freedom, and not as the second household expense after housing.

After COVID

But, in addition to the failure of the mobility policy, there is also a huge failure in land management. How is it possible that thousands of homes are still being erected on flood-prone land, as successive floods have shown, knowing that the day it rains much more than expected, as it is happening now, the streams will become small Danube, Elbe or Rhine, destroying everything in their path?

I am an eternal optimist.

Land management based on risks has never been a thing in Valencia, let alone a metropolitan policy unifying all local urban planning policies.

As incredible as it may seem, Valencia has not set up any metropolitan governance, and without it there is no transport policy, no land management policy, no prevention scheme about the devastating effects of climate change. Many Valencian friends tell me: “In Valencia we suffer the consequences of the policy of every man for himself.” And I believe them.

But because I am an eternal optimist, I hope that this second lesson after COVID will ignite change in our public policy.