The Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, has recognized that the Ministry of Ecological Transition is also “obliged to provide answers” about questions such as why years later no works have been carried out to mitigate the identified flood risks, for example, to divert the channel of the Poyo ravine that ended up flooding towns such as Paiporta or Alfafar, and has postponed until later the “analysis” of who did what with the information about the flooding of the channels and the weather forecasts in Valencia those that the different administrations decided on last October 29, for which, he said, “everyone must assume responsibilities”, including himself.
“It is advisable not to anticipate conclusions at this time in relation to the analysis of how we acted and what information was available; we will probably have to evaluate this in a later process.” Then, he added that “everyone will have to assume the responsibilities that correspond to them, starting with the one who speaks to them.”
In this way, Vice President Teresa Ribera’s number two in environmental matters, responsible for organizations such as the AEMET and the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), has not shied away from possible responsibility for the data that both provided to the Valencian authorities in the hours before DANA devastated the province of Valencia. He did so during his appearance this Wednesday at the Congressional Ecological Transition Commission in which, in response to questions from the PP, he reaffirmed that the data on the growth of the riverbeds and the weather forecasts were sufficient for institutions such as the The Provincial Council of Valencia or the University of Valencia will cancel activities and suspend classes and, he said, the same ones with which the autonomous government of Carlos Mazón decided not to launch the alert to citizens until after 8 p.m.
“I have to tell you objectively that with the same information, in the same territory and at the same times, there were administrations that activated their emergency protocols at a very early hour and others that did so at a later hour,” he responded to the Valencian deputy. of the PP Joaquín Melgarejo. “If there is something in emergency management that allows for a subsequent and calm analysis and reaching the ultimate consequences, it is the data, because everything is recorded, there is a temporal sequence in which we know what was done at each moment,” the Secretary of State has pointed out.
Like Mazón this Monday, Melgarejo has insisted that the CHJ did not correctly inform the Consell, not even at the Coordination Center meeting that afternoon and that, when it did so, almost at 7 p.m. to warn of a risk of overflow, it was simply with an email that was lost among a hundred others.
“Don’t you think that the seriousness of the data required an extraordinary communication, that there should have been a call to those responsible for the Generalitat?” Melgarejo asked Morán, before whom he accused the AEMET of having met on the 29th. October with “all State administrations without the Generalitat”, something that the Secretary of State has denied. As he said, the Emergency Coordination Center (CECOPI) “is a meeting between the General Administration of the State alone. The one who calls it is the Valencian Community through the competence it has and it meets at five in the afternoon and there are responsible of the autonomous State Administration”, stated Morán, who has once again confronted that, as Mazón and today the deputy Melgarejo maintain, the president of the CHJ “did not say anything there” about the flooding of the riverbed that the data already detected. That meeting that began at five in the afternoon, Morán assured, “is the moment in which the president of the CHJ transfers the risk, the first information that is transferred is in the CECOP”, not in the last email that was sent. to the Generalitat, at 6:43 p.m. to warn of a flood of up to 2,282 m3/s in the Poyo ravine.
Faced with the statements against the existence of climate change by Vox and the calls by ERC or Sumar to do more against it, the PP deputies have focused their interventions on highlighting the responsibilities of Morán and Vice President Ribera in “negligence” related to DANA, in its environmentalist approach to cleaning rivers and in unrealized works designed to reduce the risk of flooding in the province of Valencia. Morán has been much less belligerent on these issues, which he has admitted and on which he has promised a “reflection” by his department.
Regarding Ribera, the popular deputies have reproached on several occasions that the vice president is “missing” and that “she has not deigned to set foot in the Valencian Community.”
“Explanations” on the powers of the Ministry
“Is it true that Mrs. Ribera and you are the most responsible for the management of the hydraulic domain and the maintenance of the channels and hydraulic infrastructures necessary to protect the population from climatic events and the most responsible for the AEMET and the hydrological information systems responsible for preventing floods of water,” asked Melgarejo, who has had a special impact on the “minimum intervention” policy for cleaning riverbeds that the Ministry of Ecological Transition informed the Ministry of Ecological Transition a few years ago. Congress by answering a written question.
“I am not going to remove even a comma from the intervention he has made because it is understandable at this time that any Valencian citizen is looking for answers,” Morán said to all these questions. “We are all obliged to give answers,” he insisted.
Works planned but not done
One of the Ministry’s responsibilities was to have carried out various projects designed to minimize the risk of flooding diagnosed by the Hydrographic Confederation itself in areas such as the Poyo and La Saleta ravines, which on Tuesday of last week ended up overflowing and washing away dozens of Valencian towns. Morán has recognized this and has linked the lack of budget to carry them out.
“If the La Saleta ravine or the Sellent dam had been conditioned, if those works had been carried out, would at least part of the tragedy have been avoided?” asked PP deputy César Sánchez, who reproached Morán that “has not given any explanation about the hydraulic infrastructures planned for years, which were known to be necessary and have not been executed.” “How do we explain to neighboring businesses that have seen how at the stroke of a pen absolutely everything disappeared that your Ministry and Ribera have not built the necessary infrastructure”? he insisted.
Morán has estimated in “thousands and thousands” the projects of this type that pass from one plan to another “over time”, worth “thousands and billions of euros” for which historically there have not been sufficient resources. , in something that has happened to him and his predecessors, also from the PP, who have been forced to choose the works that could be done based on a risk that, for example, in the case of the Poyo ravine, was evaluated very carefully. below what was reality.
“Many of them have been planned for a long time,” Morán has acknowledged, since the CHJ study that identified its need in 2007, and that “advance has been made” from 2018-2019, when the current Government comes to office. can. However, he has acknowledged that like his predecessors, he has also encountered budgetary constraints for this. “What we have tried to do is expedite it to the extent of available resources,” he said, before making it clear that this has been a problem not just his. “I have to express my solidarity with my predecessors in the Ministry, because they did what they could with the financial tools they had, which were not generous. They had to make the decision of which works were a priority and which ones I am not sure they made a decision on. function of risk calculation”.
In this case, Morán has announced that the project to provide an alternative channel to the Poyo ravine will have to be “resized” after the DANA. At this point, the maximum risk forecasts for 500 years spoke of 1,400 m3/s and on Tuesday of the week they circulated “4,000 m3 per second, almost multiplied by four the highest risk assessment of the studies.”