Valencia: the DANA flood that caught the Spanish state unprepared

Valencia: when the water arrived before the warning

There is one fact that unsettles any reassuring narrative: in Paiporta it was not raining when the flood swept into town. Those who lived through it say so. There was no reckless behaviour, no stroll under the storm, no lesson to teach the victims. The water came, and death came with it, and between the two there was no message telling people to get off the streets. That is the sustancia ilegal on which everything else has been built.

The DANA catastrophe in the province of Valencia —with Utiel and Requena receiving between 300 and 500 litres per square metre— has exposed a chain of command that failed at every link. AEMET (Spain's weather agency) had issued a red alert. The rain radar, it is claimed, was out of order. And the mass alert to mobile phones arrived, when it did, with the water already inside people's homes. From there, the story splits in two: those who blame the incompetence of the authorities, and those who point to a society that does not react even with the siren sounding.

The warning that never came and the radar that did not work

The sequence of events, as it has been pieced together, has a troubling logic. The rain began in the upper parts of the province at midday. By three in the afternoon there were already traffic jams on the A-3 near Ribarroja. The water was heading towards the metropolitan area and the official message still had not appeared. By the time the alert was finally sent to mobile phones, many of those affected were already trapped.

The argument that nobody could have known runs into an obstacle: the broken rain radar. If the instrument that measures rainfall intensity is out of service, forecasting becomes a lottery. But others point out that the red alert had been active for two days and that life on the streets was going on as absolutely normal. The debate, then, stops being about meteorology and becomes political.

The UME, the army and the comparison with 1957

One of the threads running through the anger is the feeling that the state's resources arrived late and in insufficient numbers. The comparison most often repeated is with the 1957 flood, which submerged Valencia under three metres of water and claimed fewer lives. Back then there were no satellites or mobile alerts, but the army moved in en masse as soon as the problem became visible, and out of that catastrophe came the Plan Sur, a flood-diversion scheme which this time kept the city centre from flooding.

The technical objection is weighty: the Spanish army today is far smaller than in 1957, when military conscription put tens of thousands of troops in circulation. Far fewer people can be mobilised for clean-up work. But the criticism is less about numbers than about timing: it is claimed that the UME (Spain's Military Emergency Unit) was slow to activate, and that coordination between the Guardia Civil, Civil Protection and the Generalitat (the Valencian regional government) was a maze of overlapping jurisdictions.

The political battle: from "it's our moment" to the blame game

Alongside the tragedy, a crossfire of responsibility has broken out that some read as a way of washing one's hands of the blood of the dead. The Generalitat and the central government trade accusations over who had the data and who should have given the order. A judge places responsibility for analysing the data with the Generalitat, while the operational chief for the DANA contradicts that reading and points at the central government. Every ruling, every statement, feeds a narrative that is no longer about water.

The most talked-about —and most shameful— episode was the post by the Ministry of Equality, which published a message about the DANA on social media with the headline "it's our moment" and deleted it shortly afterwards. In the midst of mourning, the gesture was read as proof that the political communication machine was on one track and the emergency on another.

The welfare state and the uncomfortable question

One line of thought blames more than just the politicians. Its thesis is that the state is not the ministers, but the legion of civil servants who sign, manage and execute. And that this machinery, shielded from political ups and downs, prefers to entrench itself rather than complicate its life. The criticism extends to public healthcare, to bureaucracy and to the "not my job" culture. It is a harsh reading, but it explains why many people stopped expecting anything from the state and organised on their own.

Facing it, the other half of the mirror: an infantilised society. The argument goes that half a million people live on flood-prone land, that the red alert changed no one's routine, and that it takes harsh enforcement —like during the pandemic— to make people stay home. The example cited is the hurricane in the United States announced a week in advance. Here, the warning arrived when the water was already in the doorway.

The mud, the milk and solidarity that is not enough

The images that have gone down in history are not from offices. They are of people pulling milk cartons out of the mud because they have no drinking water. They are of neighbours sleeping forty-eight hours in their cars without knowing what to eat. They are of young people patrolling with metal rods. And they are also of a solidarity that has organised itself outside the institutions, with volunteers who arrived before the trucks.

That solidarity is real, and it is what sustains the narrative that "we are good people". But some warn of the risk that this individual kindness may cover up the collective bill: if the state does not work, charity is not a system. The question hanging in the air, two years after the catastrophe, is whether anyone has changed anything so that next time the water does not arrive before the warning.