Flash floods in Spain killed at least ninety-five people on Tuesday, leaving a trail of destruction across the country’s eastern coast. Dozens more people are still missing, while widely circulated images show a grim legacy of cars and bridges swept away by the deluges. At the center of the disaster was Valencia’s metropolitan area, the third largest in Spain, which received a year’s worth of rainfall in just eight hours.
According to meteorologists, the floods were due to a reoccurring dangerous weather system known as DANA, caused when a cold air front meets the Mediterranean’s warmer waters. Yet such phenomena have become more frequent and intense in recent years due to higher sea temperatures. “It seems clear that, with warmer waters each year, climate change is causing a radically different pattern of rainfall in the Mediterranean than we have known up to now,” noted daily newspaper El País’s former director Soledad Gallego-Díaz.
Yet the elevated death toll in Valencia also has to be understood in the context of a disastrous emergency management from the right-wing regional government — and companies’ insistence that their employees attend work. “Many of those who have died or have been injured were working at the time,” the country’s largest union, CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), highlighted. “[We] denounce the continuation of work when the risk of flooding was already known.”
Hundreds of employees were trapped overnight Tuesday in an IKEA outlet and the massive Bonaire shopping mall in Valencia, as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels. “The people who have kept us here working, without closing, are our supervisors,” one employee explained in a video posted on social media. “They didn’t let us leave….
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Eoghan Gilmartin
