While the government is widely criticized for its management of the crisis which has affected the Valencia region since last Tuesday and the terrible floods which hit the south-east of Spain, the authorities unveiled this Tuesday evening for the first time the number of people missing since these terrible bad weather: emergency services are still looking for 89 victims, says Valencia regional justice.
Thus, according to the reports provided by the national and regional authorities, 219 people died and, therefore, 89 others went missing in these bad weather, the vast majority in the Valencia region. Among them are two Chinese, two Romanians, an Ecuadorian and three British.
“The joint offices of the scientific police and the security forces have counted 89 cases of missing persons,” announced Tuesday evening the Superior Court of Justice of the Valencia region on X. The courts have already authorized the surrender of “nearly fifty bodies” of the deceased to their families, the Valencia High Court of Justice had previously specified.
More than 10 billion euros in aid
Faced with the scale of the disaster, the government announced a little earlier that it was activating “direct aid for affected citizens and businesses, as we did during the pandemic, with as little paperwork as possible and as quickly as possible. “, declared Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez after the Council of Ministers.
“What citizens want is to see their institutions not fighting among themselves, but working side by side,” he insisted, while the executive and the government of Valencia, the region most affected by floods, are the subject of strong criticism for their management of the disaster.
Video“Are we the first responders here? »: near Valence, these French firefighters came to help the victims
Assuring that the government was on the side of those affected, Mr. Sánchez announced direct aid for 30,000 businesses and 65,000 self-employed workers. He also specified that the State would cover 100% of urgent expenses incurred by municipalities to help their citizens and clear the streets. “The total investment of all these first measures” will exceed “10.6 billion euros”, indicated Mr. Sánchez, specifying that he had “formally requested” assistance from the European Solidarity Fund from Brussels.
“There are still people to be located, houses and businesses are destroyed, buried under mud,” recalled the Prime Minister, who castigated the “irresponsible speeches” of climate skeptics, in view of the disaster which affected the region. “Climate change kills,” he insisted.
