Salomé Pradas, the former Emergency Minister of Valencia, returns to Congress this Monday to testify as the person responsible for the management of the dana of October 29, 2024. She does so a year after her first appearance and a week after the former Valencian president Carlos Mazón went to the parliamentary commission to answer the deputies' questions. During this year, new information that has come to light has exposed the story of the Mazón Government and the version that the information it had was insufficient and that it reached Cecopi - the body of the Generalitat Valenciana that managed the crisis - in the afternoon. Although the truth is that he entered the center after eight in the afternoon, when the ES-Alert message had already been sent to the population. Pradas has not responded to the first questions from the parliamentary groups and has hid behind the fact that the case is being investigated in the Catarroja court, a case in which she is accused.
Pradas sat in the chair of those appearing several hours after the president of the Provincial Council of Valencia, Vicente Mompó, did so. "The management was a disaster. I have never denied that." With this phrase, Mompó defined this Monday in Congress what happened during the day of the dana on October 29, 2024. “I do not applaud Mazón or Pradas or you or any of my colleagues for what happened on the day of the dana (...) I do not applaud the management of the dana of any public office after what we have suffered,” the PP official responded to the questions from the deputies. Mompó has acknowledged the lack of response from the Valencian Government on the day of the tragedy, but has justified it in the thesis that the regional Executive continues to put forward: “There was a lot of information missing that day.” He also responded to Mazón's role in the management of the dana, saying:
-Do you think that the victims who say that Mazón should not be certified are right or wrong?
―The victims are the ones who are right from the beginning.
The president of the Provincial Council has attacked the deputies who have demanded answers about what he did that day. "What was my mistake? Being the only person who, having no obligation, risked his life trying to help? Why didn't you do the same?" Mompó read in a final speech prepared and given during the question time of his political group. The senior Valencian official has stated that few people - he did - canceled their agenda the day before the dana, in accordance with the weather warnings. "Whoever has a responsibility, let him assume it. And whoever has to respond to justice, let him respond. But analyzing everything means analyzing everything, not just what fits into the political narrative," the senior official stressed.
It is not the first time that Mompó and Pradas go to the commission to testify about their responsibilities on the day of the tragedy, what they did and what they did not do. Both Pradas and Mompó have already responded to the deputies' questions; The first appeared last December and the second, in November. The two evaded responsibilities.
Mompó has confirmed everything he said in his previous appearance: that at Cecopi the main concern was the failure of the Forata dam and that the objective of the ES-Alert that was sent was to warn of that possibility. He has also maintained that no one was in charge of the emergencies, as Mazón maintained in his appearance last Monday, but that all members of the coordination center were involved. "That was not a plenary session that I was directing. It was a fluid thing where we were making decisions," he stated.
The president of the Provincial Council has said that when the possibility of sending a mass alert to mobile phones was put on the table, "I had never heard of it, just like those who were there, many of them." Likewise, he stressed that the possibility of sending that emergency message to citizens was not raised until after seven in the afternoon. But the truth is that the alert was raised three hours before it reached the Valencians' cell phones, according to a video of the meeting that day that the Generalitat hid for months.
Both Pradas and Mompó were at the Cecopi meeting on the day of the floods, from which the ES-Alert was sent after several hours of debate. The message reached citizens' cell phones after eight in the afternoon, when at least 155 people had already died and the situation of several dozen Valencians was insurmountable.
That alert was also sent before Mazón arrived at Cecopi. Last Monday, the former president refused in the Congressional commission to answer the deputies' questions and only revealed that he was not in charge of the emergency when he entered the emergency center. One more statement from the former leader of the Valencian Government, who for months released different versions of his management to the press.
During the first year after the floods, Mazón repeatedly denied, for example, the time at which he had arrived at Cecopi, the duration of his meal that day with a journalist in a restaurant booth, the communications he had with Pradas or his knowledge of the existence of dead people as the day progressed.
