Carlos Mazón, the president of the Valencian regional government, was taking a long lunch with a female journalist in a city-centre restaurant until the evening the day the Valencia flood brought devastation. Eugene Costello reports
Carlos Mazón, the president of the Valencian regional government, was taking a long lunch with a female journalist in a city-centre restaurant with a female journalist until the evening the day the Valencia flood brought devastation.
Differing reports say the lunch continued until 5 or 6pm, by which time the flood was already bringing devastation to towns outside the city. He was with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana
to offer her the directorship of public television.
Mazón is already under pressure after crowds ran him out of town in Paiporta, the epicentre of the flood damage, caling him “Asesino” (murderer). Added to that is the fact that he put out a tweet at lunchtime saying the storm was likely to have passed by 6pm, and that the civil protection alert was not sent out until 8:11pm. All of this despite the national weather agency AEMET issuing a red alert at 07:13am. He later deleted the tweet.
What is going to be difficult to survive politically is that a meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Centre (Cecopi), which Mazón did not attend, started at 5 p.m. Stories are emerging that Pedro Sanchez’s minster of the interior, Pilar Bernabé, offered help from central government four times. Mazón declined three of those times, reportedly.
As for the prelude to the crisis, the management carried out by the Valencian government presided over by Carlos Mazón has been questioned, especially with regard to the handling of the alerts so that the population could be warned in advance of what could happen and not when it was already too late in most cases. A system for sending alerts that the regional councillor for Justice and Home Affairs, Salomé Pradas, admitted on Thursday that she was unaware of until the day the catastrophe occurred, says Valencia Plaza.
Anger is rising in Valencia with at least 207 dead, 93 missing, vehicles piled up like scrap metal and a desolate panorama of mud covering everything.
Vilaplana, head of publicity for the Levante football club and a freelance media consultant says that she declined the job.
The hashtag #valencianrevolution is becoming ubiquitous. A demonstration is planned for tomorrow, Saturday 9 November, at 6pm in Valencia’s Plaza de Ayuntamiento.