Iberdrola sent its “emergency” message on the day of the strike at 4:30 p.m., almost four hours before the Generalitat

The “alert situation” message was declared at 13:40 on October 28, the day before the storm in the Valencian Community, due to the forecast of storms. In this way, the control center of I-DE Redes Eléctricas Inteligentes warned its workers of what could happen based on the weather forecast. The next day, this electricity distribution company of the Iberdrola group sent another message in which it declared the “emergency situation” at 16:30 due to the “precariousness of the network”, which meant activating a plan that mobilized 40 brigades from other autonomous communities.

The Generalitat did not send the alarm message (Es-Alert) to citizens' mobile phones until 8:11 p.m. that day, a very late alert that is the focus of much of the political debate and the investigations of the Catarroja judge who is investigating the case on the management of the emergency caused by the historic floods that claimed the lives of 227 people in the province of Valencia. The Valencian Government, headed by Carlos Mazón, of the PP, maintains that it did not send the alert earlier due to a lack of information on the seriousness of the situation.

The succession of these messages and others, sent by the company between October 28 and 29, was presented this Monday by Francisco Ferrandis, engineer and head of the Valencia Capital sector at I-DE Redes Eléctricas Inteligentes, at the conference Dana 2024: engineering and dana pushed to the limit, organised by the College of Civil Engineers in Valencia. Ferrandis explained how the company acted to restore the electricity supply to its 180,000 customers in the affected area and stressed the great importance of “anticipation and planning” in an emergency situation. The industrial engineer went into detail about what the CEO of Iberdrola in Spain, Mario Ruiz-Tagle, had revealed in January during a visit to Valencia, and emphasised that the company's prompt mobilisation and compliance with its emergency protocol allowed them to act more quickly.

The forum was attended by numerous engineers from different specialties, representatives of professional associations, private companies and various public administrations, such as the Generalitat, the Government and the Provincial Council of Valencia. They showed complicity among themselves, demonstrated their knowledge of each other's work and gave very similar readings on the problems and the enormous work of restoring the badly damaged railway infrastructures, for example, the Cercanías or MetroValencia, or the motorways and roads owned by the national, autonomous or provincial governments.

They considered the importance of emergency contracts and the willingness of companies to undertake the works urgently. They also agreed on the difficulties of being able to access the affected areas in order to assess the damage and act urgently, which is why they called for training as emergency services. They also stressed the need to undertake hydraulic works that would have alleviated the effects of the flood and saved “lives”, according to the president of the College of Civil Engineers, Miguel Ángel Carrillo. The president of the College of Architects of the Valencian Community, Salvador Lara, recalled, however, that the magnitude of “what has happened is unprecedented and was unforeseeable”.

In this regard, Carrillo advocated reaching a consensus on water in Spain and establishing a State pact between all administrations in this matter is “unpostponable”, while he has stressed that, as has been confirmed after the tragic flood, “hydraulic infrastructures save lives and property”. It is necessary to make “a long-term analysis and strategic prevention against new floods”, since “in the 21st century, in a developed country like Spain and a reference in Europe in many areas, we cannot accept that technical indications are not taken into consideration and that, as a consequence of not carrying them out, a human and material tragedy of the magnitude of the one that occurred” in the ravine of October 29 could occur. “The human and material consequences of this tragic flood could have been reduced if the hydraulic infrastructures that were planned had been built”.

If a channel, ravine or gully has the capacity to drain a certain maximum flow, he explained, “the only way to avoid flooding in the event of a large flood is to build hydraulic infrastructure such as dams and weirs to level it, that is, so that less water reaches the channel instantly and in necessary cases, when the water that later reaches the channel is greater than it can drain, we should also have artificial channels to channel this excess water.”

Hydraulic works

In this regard, he referred to the fact that Seopan (the Association of Construction and Infrastructure Concession Companies of Spain) prepared a budget estimate - supported by the college - and which indicates that all the works planned between 2022 and 2027 in the Júcar basin require an investment of 3.17 billion euros. He commented that the management carried out on the channels could have been "weighed down" by the imposition of considerations derived from an interpretation of Directive 2007-60 of the European Community, with which prevention and environmental restoration strategies have been prioritized, leaving structural measures that did consider hydraulic aspects in the background.

In addition, he considered it necessary to review the automatic hydrological information systems of the Júcar and advocates a review of the current protocol that determines the activation of the national emergency through specific and objective parameters. “It is necessary to technically improve, at the highest level, the risks and the alert systems,” said Carrillo, who described it as “essential to improve control between the alert systems, communication between administrations and technicians, decision-making in emergency actions and warning the population, taking into account that more than half of the deceased, in this case, were over 70 years of age.”

The intense day was opened by the Government's commissioner for recovery after the Dana, José María Ángel, in the absence of the Consell's vice president for the Dana, Francisco José Gan Pampols, who did not attend the meeting due to a medical appointment, as he informed the organization. Ángel stressed that the central Executive "has injected 1,746 million euros that the town councils have already received", from the 201 million in Paiporta to the half million euros in Benifaió" and recalled the 500 million from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition for the integral water cycle of the affected populations.