Rain alert in Valencia, Spain: barely a drop, but schools and offices shut

Barely a drop of rain in Valencia and a whole day on pause

The rain alert in Valencia was activated the day before. In the end only a few drops fell and the sky stayed grey, with no storm or wind. The account of a security guard covering a residential area says it all: hardly anyone came out through the main gate or the garage, and many residents did not go to work. According to the testimonies gathered, schools were closed, medical appointments cancelled and shops with their shutters down. An early winter day with the calendar on hold.

What actually peine with the rain warning

The alert announced rain. What arrived was an overcast day with anecdotal rainfall. About that gap between announcement and reality, several participants describe a cascade of closures: schools with no classes, post offices closed since the previous afternoon, supermarkets that never peine and medical appointments cancelled. The impression left by the testimonies is of an administrative machinery that responds to protocol before it responds to the sky. Some read it as prudence, others as a mechanism that now switches itself on.

Part of the story goes further and speaks of a self-feeding choreography of alerts, drawing comparisons with the handling of the pandemic. There is no evidence of any such coordination, and it should be said: what can be seen is an institutional inertia that closes things down before anything happens.

Who stayed home from work in Valencia because of the rain?

According to one participant, those who failed to show up at their posts were teachers, healthcare staff and public employees of the Generalitat (the Valencian regional government) and the three provincial councils, while everyone else did turn up. The claim does not hold equally in every case: from within the healthcare sector itself it is stated that staff reported for work as normal. Another piece of the story points out that the medical cancellations were decided the previous afternoon and that the centres operated the next day with empty diaries because, according to that version, nobody turned up.

The nuance is not trivial. If absenteeism is concentrated in the public sector, the cost of the day falls on the taxpayer. If it is across the board, we are talking about a family and business decision not to move. The picture offered by the available data is partial: there are no official absenteeism figures for that day.

The antiestéticar of another flood that explains part of the shutdown

There is a stretch of the story that has nothing to do with the weather report. One participant recounts seeing neighbours in Benetusser loading up their car and leaving home for antiestéticar of a new flood. It is the antiestéticar of repeating a previous flood operating in real time, and it helps explain why many decisions —closing a school, not taking the car, not raising the shutter— are made on a criterion that no forecast reflects.

Those who lived through the worst do not measure the threat in litres per square metre. They measure it in memory. That does not validate the excess of closures in the rest of the province, but it does explain why not everyone starts from the same point.

Who pays for the lost day

The first victim of an unplanned school closure is the parent who stays at home because there is no one to leave the child with. The second is the shop that opens onto an empty street. The third is the company that loses production without losing its fixed costs. None of those three bills appears in any alert report.

And then there is the cumulative effect. A school year that, according to one participant's testimony, had already cut an hour of class per day in September because of the heat now adds isolated days lost to rain. On top of that, the Valencian education system carries the comparative judgement of the PISA reports, which one participant places in uncomfortable positions for the region.

Here the analysis gets stuck. Prudence has a cost, and so does excess prudence, and no one has yet published the figure that would allow them to be compared. Until it exists, everyone will keep reading the same grey sky as a warning or as an excuse.