Featured image: flood on this Monday in the surrounding areas of Valencia. Source: El País
Today it has been reported that 158 people died after the so-called DANA, what means “Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos” – literally a high altitude, isolated depression – a recurring type of storm often seen in the Iberian peninsula at this time of year. The worst part has been in the Valencian region, in the surrounding areas of the city of Valencia, mainly the southern ones. More heavy rains are expected in the upcoming days in other parts of the Spanish State, such as in Castellon (northern part of Valencian region) as well as in the south of Catalonia.
While DANAs aren’t unusual in the region, the Mediterranean has seen record-breaking warm waters this summer. A warm atmosphere holds more moisture and so as the world continues to warm we can expect to see these sorts of events become more extreme because the Mediterranean sea it is already instable or variable in its behavior. But with the climate change this kind of phenomena are becoming more frequent and much more violent. Then also the effects are much larger since there have been other big DANAs; for example in 1973 there was a big one which brought big damages to the south and south-east of the Iberian peninsula. But the experts are defining the DANA of those days as “the worst of the century in the Valencian region”, and the third-deadliest nature catastrophe in the history of the country. And it has not even been seen all the damage caused by the DANA as there are still many vehicles, buildings and areas damaged which have not been recovered, so most likely more bodies will be recovered.
The State has not done anything to prevent the huge massacre. There have been many statements by State officials claiming that those natural disasters cannot be avoided, or that these floods were completely unexpected and with no comparison with the previous ones. The truth is that several questions failed or caused this problem: regarding the prevention, many experts have said already that the infrastructure of the Spanish cities it is in a very bad shape. Regarding the DANA, the experts were warning since a long time ago that many buildings were in risk of being flooded, the buildings were built without control and the bourgeois administrations at a local, regional and State level were just allowing such things. Additionally, there are many solutions that could minimize the risk such as having more green areas around the rivers, and not harvests which are drying the land close to the rivers. Then also the construction of more dams (the reservoirs in the area are completely full already) or to build more river channeling. But also the own experts from the bourgeois institutions explain that there are no resources assigned to prevention. This type of measures was not interesting for the interests of the bourgeoisie and for the increasing of the profits and this has been happening since the beginning of the existence of the bourgeois Spanish State, since the measures have been always pointed out by experts, but never applied.
Then another big problem was the lack of means. The Valencian regional government, which is lead by the conservative party, the PP, few months ago dismantled a Unity of Emergencies, created to intervene in cases of nature catastrophe and to coordinate efforts of rescue, with firefighters and other logistic units in the case of emergency. This of course is part of the criminal responsibility in this tragedy, but also it is true that the social-democrats who are yielding this fact against the conservative party to gain some votes, only assigned 9 million euros to this unity when they created it. So this would be also very insufficient and the criticism is really cynical since they never gave importance to the matter of prevention. So both governing parties, which are continuously exchanging position in the regional and State government, PSOE and PP, were giving the same importance to prevention: none.
But the bourgeois State and its several institutions not only disregarded the prevention with a proper infrastructure or investing the necessary resources in rescue and emergency teams. They even failed at the time of warning the inhabitants of the region. 60 percent of the dead people were in their vehicles. This could have been mostly avoided just by warning on time the people to prevent them to go to the streets. Some social media accounts of the regional government warned about danger of floods at Tuesday’s noon, but there was no center of coordination until 17:00 and there were no warnings to the phones to the inhabitants until 20:00 when everything was already out of control. On the top of it, bourgeois politicians were stating that everything was fine, that the floods were going better and for half of the noon everything would be under control.
The Valencian regional president has also announced an aid package of at least 250 million euros for the affected people due to the DANA. But obviously these kind of statements come after the damages that have been caused. And also those aids are nothing more than crumbs, since the aids will be around 6,000 euros, but there are tens of thousands of people affected who lost their vehicles, house, who have lost relatives… So these 6,000 euros will be more than insufficient. Therefore, the upcoming situation is a State and regional government offering crumbs to the people after being responsible for the death of their relatives and the loss of mostly everything they had.
red herald
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