The devastating floods that killed more than 220 people in Spain have delivered a stark warning on how official blunders can cause the failure of disaster alert systems in an era of hard-to-predict catastrophes.
As a reckoning continues over mismanagement of the October disaster, criticism is being heaped on the Valencia regional government, which failed to send an emergency alert to mobile phones until after 8pm on the first day — nearly 13 hours after the state weather agency warned of “very intense” rain.
Much of survivors’ anger has been directed at Carlos Mazón, the conservative head of the regional government. On the day of the floods, he had a three-hour lunch with a female journalist that, according to local media, did not finish until 6pm, when some towns and villages were already swamped and the first reports of missing people had come in.
Over the weekend 130,000 people protested on the streets of Valencia’s capital calling for Mazón to resign. “Our hands are stained with mud, theirs with blood,” said some placards.
But beyond alleged individual failures, disaster experts say Spain’s trauma holds lessons for other countries, including around the Mediterranean, where climate change is creating new threats that are as dangerous as they are hard to predict.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the COP29 summit in Baku on Tuesday that he wanted “to say loud and clear that climate change kills”.
Jesús Lluch Ferrer, director-general of BUSF, a firefighters’ NGO specialising in disaster relief, said the state weather agency Aemet had done its job by sending technical alerts that culminated in the most serious “red” warning at 7.36am on the day of the floods.
“But then the flow of information, and especially the reaction to that flow of information, was not sufficient,” he said. “The technicians can inform, they can warn, but they are not the executive branch. They can’t tell people to stay at home. They can’t tell companies to close their doors.”
Even before the Valencia floods, examples of inadequate alert systems have been piling up.
Following the 2021 floods that killed more than 200 in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, a UN University assessment noted that “improving the dissemination and understanding of early warning messages is key”. After 102 died in wildfires in Hawaii in 2023, an official analysis said that “insufficient or ineffective alerts” had contributed to the toll.
The UN has set a target for the entire world to be covered by nationally run early warning systems by the end of 2027. Kamal Kishore, who heads the UN’s disaster-risk-reduction arm, said there had been “huge improvement” in alert systems in the past 10 years but that they were still “nowhere near where they need to be”.
Responsibility for alerts is often split between different institutions, making co-ordination paramount. In Spain, where the institutions are overseen by political parties locked in a permanent feud, a blame game has broken out.
Because the regions lead disaster response in Spain, the Socialist-led central government said Mazón’s administration, run by the People’s party (PP), bore the responsibility for not lighting up mobile phones with a timely alert.
Mazón continued with his regular schedule on the morning of October 29 and appeared in a video on social media platform X shortly after 1pm saying the rains were moving away. Teresa Ribera, Spain’s environment minister, said that by early evening it was clear Valencia “was not making the right decisions”.
PP officials are trying to point the finger at Ribera, who is likely to become the top Socialist in the new European Commission. Ribera’s ministry is responsible for Aemet and also for a public authority that monitors the level of watercourses, which the PP said did not do enough to raise the alarm about the risk of rivers bursting their banks.
Training is also an issue. The slowness of the response pointed to a limited understanding of severe weather among some decision makers, who struggled to assess the extent of the threat and work out what to do, said experts.
Vicky Palma, a disaster response adviser who has worked with the government of the Canary Islands, said the job of assessing the vulnerability of people and property often fell to civil servants who rotated between different departments and did not have the necessary expertise.
“You need meteorologists in the civil protection department, people who understand what is happening and can translate the scientific information for others,” she said.
Every Spanish region is able to send emergency alerts to all mobile phone users in a disaster zone after an EU directive required member states to set up the necessary systems by 2022.
But Salomé Pradas, head of Valencia’s emergency department, told television station À Punt last week that she did not learn it was possible to send such warnings until the evening of the first day of the floods. She later retracted that statement.
Mazón said on Monday: “There will come a time, sooner rather than later, when every administration will review their performance. I think we have to accept that mistakes have been made.”
But he has sought to downplay the significance of his long lunch. He said he remained in contact with colleagues by telephone and that his presence was not required at a key meeting of an emergency committee that began at 5pm. It was not until around 7pm that “everything changed”, Mazón said, after the water authority reported a rapid surge in the level of watercourses.
One central government official noted that hours earlier other institutions had acted on phone calls and media reports about the Aemet alert, with the University of Valencia, about 20 town councils and dozens of schools closing.
Even if people are aware of a threat, warnings do not work unless they have been educated on how to respond, experts say. “People often don’t know how to act in certain emergencies,” said Alba Barrado, a consultant who has worked on disaster plans for councils in Valencia.
Tragic proof came in Valencia as people tried to move their vehicles out of basement car parks due to fears they would flood, but ended up drowning after being caught by the torrent underground.
“When I talk to people about natural hazards, the attitude is often ‘no, not here’ or ‘how could it be so dramatic?’,” said Barrado. “Well, unfortunately, sometimes it happens.”
Additional reporting by Carmen Muela in Madrid
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