When it rains, we remember Mazón
In a relatively short time, we have had to come to terms with the fact that climate change has ceased to be a warning or an alarm and has begun (it seems, only begun) to turn not only into a perceptible reality, but directly into a real threat. Some experts say that the Mediterranean climate is undergoing a process of tropicalization, and that for this reason, downpours, floods, and new phenomena—or ones hitherto unusual or unknown, for which new names must be invented, such as the medicane or Mediterranean hurricane (sometimes these new names will need to be refined a bit)—are becoming increasingly frequent: attempts to name a phenomenon that closely resembles a hurricane, in a place in the world where there had never been any hurricanes before. It is just one example, there are—there will be—plenty more.
Tools to protect us are also being refined and improved. The ES-Alert system, increasingly widespread (citizens of the Balearic Islands heard it ring on our mobile phones for the first time this past Sunday), works well, or reasonably well. The calls from authorities and the media to a citizenry that is better informed and more aware every day, also work. Catastrophic phenomena like the DANA Adam, which has caused the lockdown of almost a million people in the Valencian Country, and which has left spectacular rainfall wherever it has passed, cause material damage but few human tragedies. Naturally, there should be none, no deaths from torrential rain, but we use the word few by comparison with cases in which there have been many.
And it is here that it is inevitable to recall the case of the DANA that caused 230 deaths, also in the Valencian Country, almost two years ago. In the mix of ineptitude, shamelessness, and malice of a council of the Generalitat Valenciana that included everything from an emergency minister who was unaware of the existence of the ES-Alert system to a head of the President's cabinet who scolded her (and stopped her) if it occurred to her to confine the population, naturally passing by a president of the executive who spent the afternoon locked in a private room at a restaurant in the company of a journalist, without allowing anything or anyone to get him out of there, while the Valencians were already dying drowned. And it makes us think of the torrent of indignity that came after, with the lies and the desperate forward escapes of the unpresentable Mazón, who was also covered up by his party until the biased justice system took charge of obstructing the work of the judge of Catarroja.
No matter how much the PP and its circle tried to deflect responsibility onto everyone who stood in their way (and especially, of course, onto Pedro Sánchez), and no matter how much Mazón has shown that his baseness has no measure, everyone will always remember that he and his government were the direct culprits of those 230 deaths. And every new emergency that is overcome without casualties, or with very few casualties, simply thanks to the application of safety protocols, leaves them even more exposed.
