Pradas and Mompó return to protect Mazón

ValenciaWith selective lapses of memory on the part of the president of the Provincial Council of Valencia, Vicent Mompó, and with silence in the case of the former Minister of Emergencies and Interior Salomé Pradas. Once again, the former head of the Consell Carlos Mazón has received the protection of his former subordinates, who avoided revealing any details about the actions of their former leader in his second appearance before the DANA commission of the Congress. A behavior that is especially striking in the case of Pradas, given that she is charged with the crimes of reckless homicide and reckless injury for the management of a catastrophe that already has 233 fatalities. This Monday, a resident of Catarroja was added to the list, who suffered an intracranial hemorrhage when the force of the water that entered her home knocked her down.

The first to show his loyalty was Mompó, who defended that his amnesia is not the result of a strategy to exonerate Mazón. The president of the Provincial Council was summoned again after progressive groups detected contradictions during his first statement. Especially when he changed his version regarding his testimony on the La Sexta program Salvados –in which he said he spoke with the former head of the Council by phone about how to alert the population–. This Monday he ratified his new account and when asked if he discussed the ES-Alert with the politician from Alicante, just as he explained on Salvados, he limited himself to saying that he does not know. "I don't remember," he insisted.

In the case of Pradas, the chosen strategy was silence. The former minister refused to answer whether the former president took the reins of the Cecopi when he joined at 8:28 p.m., and argued that she had already done so in her statement before the investigating judge. A mutism that she prolonged when she was questioned about whether Mazón pressured her or influenced the decisions she made and, especially, in the absence of warnings to the population.

Selective amnesia?

Beyond the figure of the politician from Alicante, the appearances have made it possible to make visible some weaknesses in the accounts of the two PP leaders. In the case of Mompó, the forgetting of two conversations on the day of the DANA was particularly striking. In the first, the mayor of Torrent, Amparo Folgado, warned him at 6:38 p.m. about the critical situation of the Poio ravine. In the second, the provincial deputy for Firefighters, Avelino Mascarell, told him that at 5:00 p.m. the mayor of Chiva, Amparo Fort, had informed him about the overflowing of the ravine, already at that time. This Monday, the president of the Provincial Council repeated that he "does not remember" the call from Folgado or the conversation with Mascarell, although he admitted that they might have taken place. In this sense, he justified his amnesia due to the state of nerves experienced at CECOPI. Precisely in reference to the emergency committee, it was the only moment during which the president of the Provincial Council showed self-criticism and acknowledged that the action was "a disaster" and that he cannot applaud the behavior of "any public official". "The victims are the only ones who are right from the beginning," he concluded.

Less explicit than Mompó was Pradas who, despite announcing that she would not answer questions, and just as she already did in December 2025, finally did respond to some issues. In her interventions, she again justified her actions by claiming that she was exercising an "institutional" direction of the emergency, a figure that does not exist in legislation. Furthermore, she repeated one of the usual arguments of the PP and Vox, which is that the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation did not warn about the overflowing of the Poio ravine, despite the fact that information on rainfall and flow rates could be consulted telematically and that protocols establish that the Emergency department must consult, assess, and take appropriate measures without the need for any external body to give it a complementary verbal warning.

On another of the few occasions that the former minister answered, the former PP leader justified her department's inaction by the fact that CECOPI had been convened due to the overflowing of the Magro River in the Plana d'Utiel-Requena region and not due to the situation at the Poio ravine, and because all attention was focused on the danger of the collapse of the Forata reservoir that regulates the Magro River.