DANA judge's forceful ruling: "Cecopio seemed like a bubble isolated from the outside world."

Valencia"The Cecopio seemed like a bubble isolated from the outside world." These forceful words from the judge presiding over the DANA case sum up a growing disbelief. Every day, the judge seems more surprised by the "passivity" of the Valencian government during the most dramatic day of the cold snap, when the government presided over by Carlos Mazón ignored all the information available to it regarding the magnitude of the tragedy.

Judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra expressed her astonishment in a ruling in which she responded to a private prosecution that had demanded that she charge the Spanish government delegate in Valencia, Pilar Bernabé, as the Popular Party has also been demanding for months. In the document, the judge opposed the measure and reiterated that "the Valencian government is the highest body for the direction and coordination of civil protection in the Valencian Community."

As he has been emphasizing for weeks, Ruiz Tobarra has insisted that the Valencian Statute of Autonomy establishes that civil protection is an "autonomous community competence" and that "the obvious inaction [...] occurred at the autonomous community level." "The aim is to completely ignore the distribution of powers by shifting civil protection competence from the autonomous community to the state," he summarized.

The judge has used the writing to highlight that the list of telephone calls and communications provided by the former Minister of the Interior and Justice Salomé Pradas and the former regional secretary Emilio Argüeso make it clearer that the Generalitat showed "evident passivity in the face of a serious situation", since by the time the alert was raised [at 8:11 p.m.], most of the 0 calls for help received on the 112 number had already occurred. No measures were taken "to save the population". In meetings of the Integrated Operational Coordination Centre (Cecopi), it seemed that the attendees "remained in a bubble, isolated from the outside world, with no possibility of leaving the room and in which time passed slowly, delaying decision-making, while water and mud overflowed from the ravines and riverbeds. the threshold of the room".

To Ruiz Tobarra's surprise, Cecopi seemed "a place where no information reached them, no sound advice was given to them, and where those who entered lost consciousness or memory of the seriousness of the situation: the ravines are about to collapse, wrote the former regional Secretary of Emergencies Emilio Argüeso in a message before entering the Cecopio at 2:44 p.m., while the Es-Alert alert to the population was sent at 8:11 p.m.," he concludes.

In addition to harshly criticizing the management of the Valencian Government, the judge also had time this Tuesday to reject a request from a private prosecution seeking to obtain recordings of the vehicles that entered the Emergency Coordination Center on the day of the DANA.

Furthermore, she asked the Director General of the Natural Environment to report on the resources allocated to monitoring the Poio ravine, which caused the majority of deaths. The request comes after the Valencian Government acknowledged for the first time a few days ago that it was a responsibility it shared with other agencies such as the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation.

Finally, he has summoned eleven employees of the Valencian Agency for Security and Emergency Response of the Generalitat (Catalan Government) and the 112 telephone line to testify as witnesses. These are an Emergency Communications Operator, the Coordinator of Resources and Civil Protection, a Civil Protection technician, a senior technician specializing in Forestry Extinction Operations and Communications, and the head of the Emergency Analysis and Monitoring Unit. He also summoned three employees of the 112 operational platform in the Valencian Community and the coordinator of the Technical Communications Unit of the technological platform of this service to testify as witnesses.