I dare say that even the most outraged in l’Horta Sud with Carlos Mazónthose most satisfied with the fall of the president of the Generalitat, share another no less important concern: the need to channel and divert the Poyo basin, which has still not materialized.
The resignation of the regional president, and with his dismissal, the media focus on his errors of October 29, 2024, must now draw attention to the State’s hydraulic response to the proven death trap existing south of the city of Valencia. There is no matter more urgent than that.
The Government of Spain has lived very comfortably during the last year, in which the continuous ellipses and changes of version of the Valencian president have made him the center of a target in which the State should also be.
The fall of Mazón, now materialized, had become the greatest social demand. And once satisfied, The main desire cannot be other than to execute the pending works.
Why The political corpse of Carlos Mazón will not serve to divert the Poyo ravine.
We Valencians need the machines, sooner rather than later, to burst into the basin to carry out the channeling and diversions to the Turia projected by the experts.
A year after the tragedy, the central Executive has still not put out to tender any of the pending works in the basin, projects that received the approval of the Executive in 2011 and that have not been executed since then.
Only those hard works, designed by the engineering team of the Typsa company for the Government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapaterowill avoid a new catastrophe in the future.
It is enough to look at the mortality in each basin of the Valencia dana, compiled by this newspaper. At least 200 fatalities, close to 90%, corresponded to the Poyo basin, the only one without hydraulic protection for the population.
With the same Cecopi, with the same emergency management and similar floods of water, there were 23 victims in the Skinny (protected by the Forata dam) and 6 in the Turkeywhere the detour of the Plan Sur kept the city of Valencia intact.
They would have saved lives
Its promoters agree that the works “would have saved lives.” And they would also have avoided the destruction of populations, an issue that is being, inexplicably, out of the debate.
It should be noted that even with the best possible management of the 29-O emergency, with an early warning that would have been obeyed by each and every citizen, the affected towns would have been equally annihilated by the flood.
It happened and will happen again if nothing is done. If it rains the same and in the same place, the same thing would happen again.
The supervision of the management of the emergency, absolutely necessary, was compatible with something equally or more important: analyzing whether the Government did everything possible to protect the population.
Far from meeting this obligation, the Executive of Pedro Sanchezas previously done by Mariano Rajoybordered the proceedings. In the case of the current Government, with the aggravating circumstance that Teresa Ribera was the one who gave environmental approval to them as Secretary of State in 2011.
When she returned to the Government in 2018 as minister, she did not resume a project that she knew about first-hand. He neither reactivated it on an administrative basis nor included it in his first budgets in the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, those for the year 2021.
That year the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ), dependent on the Government itself, regretted the “stoppage of projects and works due to lack of budget availability and environmental problems”.
It was only after the dana that the Government announced that it would update and reactivate the projects, but it only envisions an immediate execution, that of the channeling of the Saleta ravine, and it has not been put out to tender yet.
That abandonment proved lethal in 2024, no matter how much this reality hurts the socialist ranks. To date they have achieved their goal of diverting attention only to Mazón’s mistakes. But those themselves must be urgently corrected to end the risk and suffering of the hundreds of thousands of Valencians who continue to live on the banks of a lethal basin.