These are days of unconsolable mourning and righteous anger in València. Accompanied by shouts of “murderer”, the king and queen of Spain were pelted with mud when they visited the area and on the same trip, the prime minister ran away when confronted.
This ‘autonomous community’ (roughly equivalent to a devolved country in the UK) has been victim to a torrential downpour not seen before in this generation. In some places, around 25 litres of water fell in just ten minutes. A whole year’s rain fell in hours. The result has been devastating scenes, with cars and debris piled up in flooded streets, locals forced to ransack local ruined supermarkets in search of food, and overstretched emergency responders working overtime to save as many lives as possible. The Spanish state government has declared the affected areas as “catastrophic zones”.
While natural catastrophes are up to a certain point unavoidable, there are multiple man-made factors that made this ‘cold drop’ (a common name used in southern Europe for sporadic strong autumn rains typical of their climate) devastating. On the wider scale, scientists fear that the intensity of this downpour is the result of changes in climate patterns due to global climatic change. In this case, rises in the temperature of the air and the sea is known to produce climates where rainfall is more intense and concentrated.
If climate change remains unaddressed, we can expect to see more extreme climatic events that will result in the loss of life and the potential inhabitability of certain zones of the planet. This tragedy puts into the spotlight the dire consequences if significant measures are not put in place to counteract pollution and environmental damage. However, given that these measures would prove inconvenient to the optimisation of profits by the ruling capitalist class, it is unlikely that, even with the loss of working-class lives to the consequences of climate change, the bosses will allow the necessary measures to be implemented.
In this particular catastrophe, the incompetence and disregard of the regional Popular Party (PP) government has also had a hand in making it worse. Questions are being asked about why the last major comparable ‘cold drop’ downpours in the region in 1982 and 1987 killed 40 and two people respectively, while currently there have been more than 200 confirmed deaths.
The regional government led by Carlos Mazón has much to answer in how it has managed this catastrophe: it has asked for volunteers to go back home despite the professional emergency workers being overstretched (while the Spanish government also refused the offered aid of 200 French firefighters), many towns have not yet been visited by support units with food and water, the debris still blocks emergency services, and the regional Secretary of Emergencies and Security was nowhere to be seen on the day either physically or in the media. Worst of all, it was Mazón’s government that shut down the Valencian Emergencies Unit in 2023 due to it being a “superfluous expense”. Clearly, the PP government does not spare a single thought for the common Valencians, and many are starting to realise that they need to be brought down.
