The DANA judge refuses to investigate city councils and once again points the finger at the Generalitat.

ValenciaAs is the case almost every Friday, the judge investigating the DANA flooding in the Valencian Community has issued several rulings that allow her to maintain the pace of an investigation that is surprising for its diligence and firmness. On this occasion, Nuria Ruiz Tobarra's most notable brief emphasizes that the Generalitat (Catalan regional government) and not the city councils were responsible for alerting the population. This statement was made in response to a request from the daughters of a victim who demanded that the mayor of Utiel, Ricardo Gabaldón, be charged for the lack of warnings. The novelty of the judge's statement is not so much the reiteration of the regional government's jurisdiction over emergency management, but rather the exoneration of the municipal authorities, whom some victims had also asked to be held accountable.

According to the judge, there is a "radical difference" between municipal and regional administrations in terms of their capacity to "disseminate alerts [...] and adopt self-protection measures" and their "knowledge of the measures to be adopted." In this regard, she points out that a municipality can only conduct a "fragmentary analysis of the information" and that it "has multiple information channels" and "emergency technicians."

Ruiz Tobarra reiterates that the procedure focuses on the late warning to the population, "despite the fact that there was sufficient information", and opposes the indictment of Gabaldón and the rest of the mayors of the affected municipalities, which specifies that they were not specifically advised on the measures to be adopted. It is for this reason that he concludes that "the indiscriminate" attribution of criminal responsibility for the deaths to any authority or public official, and especially to local authorities, who have been cited as witnesses, as is the case of the mayors of Alti, must be ruled out. Along the same lines, he refuses to investigate the actions of the Department of National Security and repeats that civil protection is the responsibility of the Generalitat, as established by the Statute of Autonomy and Law 13/2010 on civil protection, which determines that it is up to the regional ministry to exercise sole command of emergencies.

In another ruling, the judge refused to commission an expert report on the alleged falsification of the frame in which the president of the Valencian Government, Carlos Mazón, is seen entering the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) at 8:28 p.m. on October 29, 2024, as requested by the Acció Cultural organization. According to the judge, her court "lacks jurisdiction" to analyze Mazón's actions, which should be supervised by the Superior Court of Justice, a circumstance that, for the time being, the investigating judge has not requested. Furthermore, she points out that she cannot examine the image because it has not been included in the information submitted by the Generalitat. This frame was questioned by an expert in a report in the online newspaper The LeapFor the same reasons, the government has denied the possibility of requesting information about the Generalitat's resources requested by the Valencian president on the day of the disaster, such as the use of official vehicles or payment of food and lodging expenses, in an obvious reference to the lunch at the El Ventorro restaurant with journalist Maribel Vilaplana.