The head of 112 assures that the Spanish government has already planned to send the alert for the dana at 6:35 p.m.

ValenciaA year after the Dana, details are still emerging that further challenge the Valencian government of Carlos Mazón due to the late dispatch of the ES-Alert, which did not arrive until 8:11 p.m. One of the new developments was provided this Tuesday by the head of the 112 coordination service, who declared before the judge investigating the Dana case that at 6:35 p.m. on October 29, the Generalitat's Emergency Service was already studying the possibility of dispatching an hourly alert, meaning that more than 229 victims of the tragedy had already lost their lives. This statement adds to the disarray between the Ministry of Emergencies, headed by the accused Salomé Pradas, and the Valencian president himself, Carlos Mazón, with his multiple absences, a four-hour meal with journalist Maribel Vilaplana and a string of version changes.

According to the witness, the head of the Emergency Analysis Unit sent an email to the 112 call center with a proposed wording for this message, and she, "in parallel" and privately, discussed this possibility with a Civil Protection official at the Spanish government delegation in Valencia, who told her that she "needed" to submit the proposal to the Deputy Director of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, who replied that they were already "managing it."

During the witness's appearance in the Catarroja court, she also explained that then-Councillor Pradas had doubts about the legal possibility of imposing a lockdown on the population following the experience of the COVID pandemic. According to her statement, it was very difficult to know what was going to happen and that they were working with observed and behind-the-scenes phenomena at all times. She has also said that she would have expected a special warning from the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHX) if any dangerous situation was detected and that she did not hear the president of this body, Miguel Polo, say anything about the Poio ravine, although he was participating in the Cecopio meeting remotely.

Despite the extensive documentation accumulated by the judge, some unknowns still remain. The main one: what was the role of the Valencian president and did his absences influence the late constitution of the emergency committee and the equally untimely dispatch of the ES-Alert? The person who can best answer this question is Pradas, who continues to exonerate his former boss and who, unlike his former deputy, has not revealed his WhatsApp messages. Who knows if he is keeping this letter in case the judicial strategy proposed by his defense doesn't work.

While we wait for Pradas's statement, the one who will have to begin explaining herself before the judge will be journalist Maribel Vilaplana, who will have to explain what she knows about what Mazón discussed with Pradas. She will also have to say whether she can confirm that the PP leader went home after the four-hour meal and not to the Palau de la Generalitat, where he had reportedly gone at 8 p.m. The Consell (Ministry of Justice) claims that after dismissing Vilaplana, Mazón went to the Palau de la Generalitat (Generalitat Palace), but neither the records of the bodyguards nor the recordings from the building's security cameras, which were erased fifteen days after the disaster and a year later, have proved this. The Integrated Operations Unit (Cecopi) has accumulated numerous errors, some as serious as the fact that the Emergency technicians did not warn senior officials of the Ministry of the Poio ravine overflowing—the cause of most of the deaths—because "they were not authorized to interrupt" the meeting and because the emergency committee already had the emergency telegraph. Also, because the workers were "overwhelmed" by an avalanche of alerts and rescue requests. An overcrowding explained by the fact that on the day of the DANA, only 47.5% of the planned 59-person workforce was on hand, and by controversial measures such as the withdrawal of firefighters monitoring the main ravines at 2:30 p.m.

Equally striking is that at 5:15 p.m., the Deputy Director General of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, raised the possibility of sending the ES-Alert to Utiel and Requena, affected by the possible overflow of the Forata reservoir that regulates the Magre River. A possibility that was unleashed as well as the demand made by the president of the Confederation minutes before 6:00 p.m. to send the ES-Alert to the towns affected by the situation at the Forata reservoir was ignored.

In contrast to Mazón's calm, what dominated the emergency committee was chaos. Initially, all attention was focused on the possible bursting of the Forata reservoir, which regulates the Magro River. First, the plan was to confine the population, then to evacuate it. At 6:36 p.m., the decision was made to send the ES-Alert. Concern for the reservoir led to the Poio ravine, which had been overflowing since 6:00 p.m., being ignored. This oversight occurred, even though from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., the 112 call center received 2,438 calls alerting them to the situation. Overwhelmed, the technicians failed to notify their superiors of the dire flooding of the ravine, which, at 6:43 p.m., the Confederation had also alerted them to the situation via email (the information can also be viewed online in real time). At Cecopio, they were unaware of what was happening until after 7:00 p.m., when the first images and phone calls from mayors began to arrive. This forced the postponement of the alarm because it was necessary to expand its radius. And then came the time to choose the text, a moment in which Jorge Suárez and José Miguel Basset debated extensively about the suitability, content, and geographical scope of the message. Then it was time to choose the text, to initiate the procedure... Finally, the warning was broadcast at 8:11 p.m., but with erroneous content. It asked people to avoid travel, but not for the population to stay home and in high areas, as a second message did at 8:57 p.m. In any case, it was already very late, and many people had already drowned or were about to do so.