The streets are still covered in thick mud which has infiltrated all the ground floors, and it remains to clear the hundreds of damaged vehicles, sometimes thrown against the roads and railway tracks… Already, the question of political responsibilities arise: because faced with the climatic phenomenon, it is the vulnerability of the territory which is in question, depending on whether the development had sufficiently taken into account the climatic risk or not.
Was it predictable?
The “cold drop” phenomenon is boosting a usual type of event in this Spanish region, with stronger winds and more intense precipitation. It is therefore a known phenomenon but which has been amplified. Yet, Natima Baron, geographer, professor at Gustave Eiffel University, recalls that “it's an event that we saw coming, all the Valencians filmed the arrival of the water with their phones. The water arrived, overflowed the canals, exceeded the bridges, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., but the region only issued an alert call after 8 p.m..”
What political responsibilities?
To understand the slowness of the regional authorities in raising the alert, the region and the State reject responsibility. However, there are precedents, notably the 1957 catastrophe in Valencia. How had the authorities reacted to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again? “It was obviously a catastrophe, we were under Franco, and in another framework, with masterful and dominating means of nature, like a certain number of fascist regimes at the time. Franco decided to divert the Touria, that is to say to cut the passage of this river inside the city and to make it go to the sea avoiding the city. This bed of the Touria river has become a large public garden. It spared the center of Valencia this week.”
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