Spain’s Hurricane Katrina Moment Saw Officials Ignoring Warnings

As a deadly storm bore down on Valencia on Oct. 29, the regional president was attending a ceremony to recognize his work on sustainable tourism.

Three hours earlier, Spain’s national climate agency had issued a red alert about the rains that were coming. But rather than activating emergency protocols and triggering wider alerts, Carlos Mazon went off to the next meeting on his schedule.

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The towns around the coastal city have been living with the consequences of that decision ever since. The ensuing floods killed more than 200 people, destroyed billions in infrastructure, and unleashed a wave of anger towards political leaders.

The disaster, which has already become Spain’s Hurricane Katrina moment, is a cautionary tale of climate change and political failure. But it is also a story of how decades of regulatory neglect and underinvestment in critical infrastructure created the ideal conditions for a preventable disaster.

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By mid-afternoon, some local governments and cities in the Valencia region were taking their own precautions. Workers were being sent home, schools and universities were closing early, and the army’s emergency unit was preparing to deploy troops to Utiel, a city roughly 37 miles west of the region’s capital, in case help was needed.

By 5 p.m., Valencia’s local government assembled its emergency crisis committee. Mazon, the committee’s leader, wasn’t there.

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When he finally arrived at the meeting it was around 7 p.m., according to multiple reports. A little more than an hour later, the local government sent out a region-wide text message telling people to seek shelter. But by then, it was too late.

Shaky Foundations

The delayed alerts were not the only reason why the floods in Valencia were so deadly. The decentralized structure of Spanish politics, which demands coordination between regional and national authorities, slowed the response to the unfolding crisis. Political infighting dragged on relief efforts. The region’s aging infrastructure and years of overconstruction did not prepare it to withstand the waters. Facing a storm turbocharged by climate change, Valencia was particularly vulnerable.

Unlike in the Franco era, when the government used large infrastructure projects to modernize the economy, public works took a backseat in the first decades of this century. In Valencia, the advent of mass tourism and an epic real estate boom translated into runaway construction, but mostly of homes and hotels. The projects were frequently undertaken without much planning or oversight.

Given the region’s history of natural disasters, this was especially dangerous. In 1957, flooding in the Turia river killed as many as 100 people in the regional capital. To ensure that such a catastrophe wouldn’t happen again, the Franco regime built an artificial canal and rerouted the river around Valencia city.

The memory of that flood, however, faded with time. In the mid-2000, an engineer named Federico Bonet was working on a project to prevent flooding in the Poyo river, which snakes through the towns and cities just south of Valencia. But after the financial crisis hit in 2008, the former dean of the city’s College of Civil Engineers said in an interview, those plans were abandoned.

“What happens is that when no disaster happens, which is most of the time, it seems ridiculous to spend €200 million euros on hydraulic works,” he said.

The Poyo became the main artery for the Oct. 29 floods. While the Turia’s rerouting meant that downtown Valencia was largely unaffected by the rains, cities in flood zones less than seven miles away were among the worst hit.

Finger Pointing

After Mazon left the ceremony on the day of the storm, he went off the grid for several hours, reportedly to attend a private lunch. During that time, one of his advisors contacted the national government and asked that troops be sent to Utiel.

Such communication breakdowns were happening at various levels of government. In Spain, regional crisis committees rely on national agencies tasked with monitoring weather and river flow volumes to make decisions, but these agencies don’t always communicate with each other. Moreover, unless there’s a state of emergency the central government can’t interfere with a region’s decision-making — or take matters into its own hands.

Coordination between Valencia’s regional government and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s administration had been complicated since Mazon took office in mid-2023. In addition to his being a member of the People’s Party — the main opposition to Sanchez’s Socialists — Mazon’s victory was made possible thanks to an agreement with the far-right Vox party, the first such arrangement of its kind in Spain. As part of the deal, Mazon handed environmental policy over to his coalition partners, who promptly named a climate change denialist to oversee the portfolio.

Mazon’s early initiatives also included a cost-cutting spree that targeted programs backed by his Socialist predecessor. Among the programs he deemed too ideological was an emergency coordination unit. After Vox left the coalition in May, Mazon gave environmental oversight to a close collaborator with no climate expertise.

In the days after the disaster, Mazon and Sanchez restrained from criticizing each other. Then, people close to them started swapping barbs. Late on Nov. 1, after Mazon asked the central government to send 500 soldiers to Valencia, Defense Minister Margarita Robles expressed amazement that the number was so low.

The next day, following another request from Mazon, Sanchez announced that 5,000 more troops would be sent to Valencia. Counting the forces already in place, it represented Spain’s largest-ever peacetime deployment.

For the thousands of people still bailing out their homes and struggling to make sense of the tragedy, however, these measures fell far short. On Nov. 3, an enraged crowd threw mud and sticks at Sanchez, Mazon and King Felipe VI during a visit to one of the towns most damaged by the floods. Protesters chased Sanchez’s car as he fled the scene.

The next day, in his first media appearances since the storm, Mazon went on the offense. In radio and TV interviews, he blamed the central government and hydrographic agency, which monitors river levels, for failing to notify him properly and act in time. He was swiftly rebutted by the agency, which said it never issues alerts, and by the army, which said it had been prepared to deploy troops hours earlier on Oct. 29 but needed Mazon’s permission to do so.

The regional president is increasingly being singled out as the person most responsible for the scale of the disaster. Most damningly, the leader of Mazon’s own party, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, called on the prime minister to push Mazon aside and take control of the situation. Sanchez responded with the first of what he said will be several financial relief packages.

“Climate change kills, and we are seeing it, sadly,” Sanchez said when announcing the package, which could be as large as €10.6 billion. Global warming, he stressed, was a central part of the problem.

Rising Risk

The storm that hit Valencia was exceptional in that it saw the “confluence of very extreme meteorological factors,” said Samira Khodayar Pardo, the director of climate and meteorology at the Mediterranean Center for Environmental Studies (CEAM). While the most intense rainfall normally takes place at the coast, “this time it rained a lot inland, right at the headwaters of the rivers,” she pointed out.

However, she continued, the storm and the scale of the disaster can’t be distilled down into any single cause. There has to be “a perfect cocktail,” she said. That includes not only meterological considerations, but also “urban planning, infrastructure, alarm systems and even the perception of risk and education of society.”

As extreme weather events likely to become more and more common, she added, “there are many issues that must be considered.”

Top photo: Volunteers begin cleaning up after flash flooding in Paiporta.