CHJ admits 150 minutes without warning on Poyo gully

Two and a half hours without a single warning about the Poyo gully

At 18:43 on 29 October, an email went out from the Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar (CHJ, the Júcar river basin authority) with a figure in the subject line: 1,686 cubic metres per second flowing down the Poyo gully. Twelve minutes later, at 18:55, the flow gauges simply broke. The geolocated mobile alert did not arrive until 20:11, by which time water was already inside Paiporta, Catarroja and Aldaia. In between, from the 16:13 email to the 18:42 one, there was absolutely nothing.

This is not a suspicion voiced by an angry resident. It is what the authority's own president, Miguel Polo, admitted in an audio recording: during that interval "no information was transmitted about the Poyo gully". Two and a half hours of official silence while the channel turned into something else. What the Valencian government's emergency department maintains, and the CHJ denies, is who should have raised the alarm and why no one did so earlier.

The information blackout that the Confederación admits

The confession is no minor detail. For 150 minutes, the Generalitat's Emergency Centre was making decisions about a gully from which it was receiving not a single data point. Meanwhile, according to the Generalitat, the authority's attention was focused on the Forata dam and the Magro river, not on the Poyo gully.

The institutional version cracked when Polo himself stated, three months later, that the Confederación "is not responsible for the flood". The Generalitat went further: Carlos Mazón claimed that the CHJ deactivated the hydrological alert for overflow risk up to three times that same day. The judge at Investigating Court No. 3 in Catarroja has already twice requested information from the government about the dams and has asked the CHJ for data from the exact interval between 16:13 and 18:42.

The chronology of warnings: from 264 to 1,686 m³/s

The records handled by both administrations allow the day to be reconstructed almost minute by minute, although they differ on times. At 11:06 —12:09 according to MITECO— the CHJ reports that the Poyo is flowing at 264 m³/s and rising. At 12:20 Emergencies issues a hydrological warning to municipalities and requires CECOPALs to be set up. And then the matter seems to go quiet.

At 13:20 the flow drops to 120 m³/s. At 14:35, to 55.86. At 15:50, to 28.70. Numbers of a tamed stream. At around 17:00 the CECOPI meeting is held and, according to the Generalitat, "at no point does the CHJ warn there of the sudden rise in flow of the Poyo gully or of the especially dangerous consequences". MITECO says that a generalised increase in flows was verbally notified, but speaking of the Magro and the Júcar. No one suspected that the bomb was coming from another direction.

At 18:43 the figure shoots up to 1,686 m³/s, more than four times the average flow of the Ebro at Amposta. The president of the CHJ was in the coordination centre. And even so there was no verbal warning whatsoever, according to the Consell's version.

3,500 m³/s, more than double a 500-year flood

Later calculations provided by the CHJ speak of peak flows above 3,500 m³/s at the crossing between the Poyo gully and the Silla track. To put it in context: the flood with a 500-year return period — that is, the one supposed to be statistically exceptional — is estimated at 1,420 m³/s. What peine more than doubled it.

Comparing helps more than any adjective. The average flow of the Ebro at Amposta is 333 m³/s. That of the Nile, 2,830. On the afternoon of 29 October, a gully that for most of the year does not carry a single drop put more water into the same channel than the longest river on the planet. In the devastated areas it was barely raining, and that explains why life continued as normal: cars driving, supermarkets full, streets with people. What was coming down was not rain, it was a wall of water arriving from the headwaters.

A furious channel documented since 1795

None of this was a geographical mystery. The observations on the kingdom of Valencia published by Cavanilles in 1795 already described this gully as furious on page 194. Since then, the Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar has recorded a hundred floods: an average of 2.5 floods per year that makes the Poyo an area of Significant Potential Flood Risk (ARPSI).

In other words, the channel was classified, measured, catalogued and had a plan. On paper, for the administrations, the risk was known and recurrent.

€240 million approved in 2010 and never executed

The channelling of the Poyo gully was approved in 2010 with a budget of €240 million. It was never carried out. The project, by professor Félix Francés, proposed reducing the impact on the urban centres of l'Horta Sud; the engineer who was to direct it summed it up bluntly: with the work done, water would still have overflowed on 29 October, but it would barely have had an impact on the urban cores.

Since 1994, nine projects to protect the inhabitants of the comarca have failed. The construction employers' association points to the regulatory framework: the Huerta Law promoted by the Botànic, and the central government's commitment in the Senate in 2021 to start the actions that were later never put out to tender. Some maintain that the bill for the pending works on the Poyo amounts to barely 2% of the ministry's budget; the full figure, broken down project by project, leaves an uncomfortable margin for discussion. Meanwhile, Torrent has announced that it will rebuild the gully on its own, without waiting for state funds.

Why didn't the CHJ warn? The division of powers

This is where the real battle is fought. AEMET monitors whether it rains and how much; floods, however, are the responsibility of the river basin authorities. A rising flow is not meteorology, it is hydrology, and the instrument that measures it depends on the Ministry for Ecological Transition headed by Teresa Ribera. The SAIH system — Automatic Hydrological Information System — exists for that: to monitor and transmit data in real time.

The problem is that the system's own creator, Juan Soria, has explained that when it rained hardest, on the afternoon of 29 October, it failed for an hour. And he adds an uncomfortable detail: since 2023 the CHJ had planned a more modern alert system, similar to the Ebro's, which was never installed. The Confederación did not approve it until after the flood.

A system that crashes on the very day it was designed for, with no redundant plan, leaves any emergency centre blind. And blind, with 232 dead — 224 of them in the Valencian Community — it is difficult to sustain certain things.