The sun still hadn’t risen on Tuesday 29 October when the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, took another look at the warnings from Spain’s state meteorological office and ordered all the schools in the small Valencian town to close.
“The warning early that morning – at 5am or 6am – was orange,” he said. “That’s when I was weighing up whether to close the schools here. In the end, I ordered them to close at six or seven that morning. Soon after, the alert went red.”
Although the rain brought floods that have so far claimed at least 223 lives in Spain – six of them in Utiel – Gabaldón knows the death toll could have been far higher in his town had the schools been open. Children and their parents would have died on flooded roads during the drive in from surrounding villages, and students could have been drowned in their school corridors. “Thank goodness that the children weren’t here,” he said. “Otherwise we’d be talking about something else entirely.”
The foresight and initiative Gabaldón showed in the first moments of the worst natural disaster in Spain’s modern history were far from ubiquitous. The alerts that are pinged to people’s mobile phones in times of civil emergency were not sent out by the Valencian regional government until after 8pm on Tuesday. By then, a year’s worth of rain had fallen in some areas in a matter of hours and the flood waters in Utiel were three metres high.
Even as emergency teams search for the 78 people still listed as missing, questions are being asked about the authorities’ handling of the crisis, one that has brought out the very worst, and the very best, in people.
The disaster was declared a level two emergency, meaning the regional government – run by the conservative People’s party (PP) – has responsibility. Had the Valencian authorities concluded they could no longer handle the situation, the level could have been raised to allow the socialist-led central government to step in and take over.
While much of the debate has split along familiar political lines, a timeline of Tuesday’s events reveals when key decisions were, and weren’t, taken. A little before 11pm on Monday 28 October, the Spanish met office, Aemet, issued orange and red weather alerts for parts of Valencia.
At 7.36am the next morning, it updated its alerts in the region and by 9.41am, the entire province of Valencia was on red alert, with people warned of “extreme danger” in some areas and urged to keep away from rivers, gullies and flood-prone lowlands. At midday, Aemet released a video asking people to stay put.
As the severity of the floods became apparent, the central government’s representative in Valencia cancelled her agenda and called the region’s interior minister three times between noon and 2pm, offering help and resources.
About 1pm on Tuesday, Valencia’s PP regional president, Carlos Mazón, was recorded on video saying that the rains were moving away and would ease up in Valencia by the early evening. A video of his forecast was later removed from his account on X.
According to Spanish media reports, Mazón had a long lunch with a journalist until about 6pm. He arrived at the emergency command centre at about 7.30pm, where he was brought up to speed on the state of the floods.
The Valencian government, which maintains control of the emergency, did not request the deployment across the entire region of the Spanish armed forces Military Emergencies Unit (UME) until after 8pm on Tuesday, about the time the civil protection alert was finally issued.
On Thursday last week, the region’s interior minister told Valencian TV that she only found out about the mobile alert technology after a phone call from the central government’s environment ministry.
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Mazón has responded to criticisms by seeking to blame Spain’s socialist government and even the UME. But sources in the administration of prime minister Pedro Sánchez are adamant it did everything it could to warn of the disaster and is doing everything in its power to alleviate its aftermath within the constraints of a highly decentralised state.
Although the PP has pointedly thanked the other regions it governs for sending help to Valencia, it has accused Sánchez of acting in “bad faith” during the crisis.
Others have gone further in their condemnation of the prime minister. A column in the rightwing ABC newspaper this week accused Sánchez and his government of seeking to blame the deaths on climate change and people’s inability to heed the weather warnings.
“If Spaniards today weren’t so lily-livered, we’d be hanging them and quartering them and putting their remains on display in the public square so they could be bait for flies and carrion-feeders, as should be the fate of tyrants,” it added.
Delays in providing and updating the tolls of the dead and the missing have given rise to conspiracy theories and fuelled disinformation. The human tragedy, meanwhile, has been embraced by a self-declared “fascist” influencer using TikTok likes to decide which of the affected areas should receive aid paid for by his followers.
But despite the politicking, the recrimination and the outbreaks of looting, the most remarkable feature of the disaster has been the surge of solidarity it has elicited. Broom-wielding volunteers and tractor owners have arrived in the hardest hit parts of Valencia, offering help, muscle and comfort.
As well as the videos of cars spinning helplessly along torrents of mud-coloured water and pictures of sodden piles of furniture, one of the abiding images of the disaster will be of the thousands of broom-and-bucket clutching volunteers crossing a bridge in Valencia to reach those in need. When the waters finally recede and the last bodies have been reclaimed from the mud, their actions, at least, will be beyond reproach.