With Carlos Mazzone already out of the Palace of La Generalitat Valenciana, Salome Pradas rebels against him, questioning his actions on Dana’s day, blaming him for hiding his food from her and not “activating” it until 7:47 p.m. Despite the scale of the incident. … The disaster. In his opinion, he was looking for “a scapegoat to pay for or cover up anything he thought should be covered up”, although he defended the actions of the Valenciana government. He did so, more than a year later and at peak time, but without consequent to a radical change in the judicial statement he submitted in April before the Cattaruga judge investigating the criminal case related to the canyon management that resulted in the deaths of 229 people in the province of Valencia.
Although now, in an interview with the LaSexta program “Salvados”, he gives details that he did not tell in that appearance and in the face of a new offer from the judge, he will formally refuse to be cross-examined again on Monday and will consider doing so if his defense deems it advisable to clarify any aspect of the proceedings that still have to be carried out.
The former Minister of Justice and Interior of the Autonomous Government is accused together with Emilio Argüeso, who was her “number two” at the time, in the proceeding, which was opened due to alleged murders and reckless injuries and focused on failure to notify the population. Specifically, in the decision-making process that took place at the meeting of the Center for Coordination of Integrated Operations (Cecopi), the body that directed the emergency with Pradas in command, the sending of the alarm was delayed at 8:11 p.m., with the towns already submerged by water, the content of which also did not warn of the necessity of ascending to high areas and asking to avoid displacement.
Pradas, which has emergency powers, has already confirmed that it did not wait for Mazzone’s orders to act on October 29, 2024 or raise the alert and that it was the technicians who suggested the actions, as it has no knowledge or experience in emergency situations. But now, an interview for LaSexta’s “Salvados” program focuses for the first time on the specific person responsible for the delay in sounding the alert: former chief inspector of the Valencia County Fire Protection Association, Jose Miguel Bassett. He was the head of emergency operations.
Although the Deputy Director General for Emergency Situations, Jorge Suarez, who will testify next Thursday, indicated this at around 5:30 p.m. Regarding the possibility of sending a message to mobile phones in the Auteuil area, Pradas defends that he did not know anything about the ES-Alert system until minutes before 7 p.m., when Suarez put a draft on the table – written by technicians, who “feared the impact of the stampede” – to be launched in Ribeira in the face of the possible collapse of the Vorata dam. That was when the debate began in Sekopi. Although she and Suarez wanted to send the letter, Bassett — who was also cited as a witness, undated — suggested that sending it might “backfire.”
He stresses that “if the highest-ranking emergency chief and emergency operations chief get into a debate about the adequacy of an early warning system or not, it would be contradictory, and even unwise, for a political leader to say yes or no, or put the balance on one side or the other, without having sufficient technology to make the decision.” When you decide – between 7:30 p.m. At 7:35 p.m., the technicians were already immersed in the procedure – it took more than half an hour to fully operate the system, which had not been “sufficiently tested.”
“I told him to tell the truth to the victims.”
Salome Pradas harshly attacked Carlos Mazzone without being self-critical, insisting that he had no information to make decisions. The biggest mistake she made as Chancellor-in-Charge was not asking the President to be in Sekopi. He apologized for “not being able to do more.” Mazzone won’t be there. He thinks he should have canceled his meal and long sit-down at El Ventorro restaurant in Valencia. He found out his whereabouts on November 8 from the press: “I couldn’t believe it.” In fact, when Mazzone informed her that he would reconstitute his government, days after the Valley, and that he would dismiss her, Pradas attacked her, saying that “he was blaming her” even though she was “from the beginning where she should have been” and asked her to tell the truth about her whereabouts after “several accounts”: “I told her that if she did not do it for me, she would do it for the victims,” with whom she hoped the state would redirect. Relationship. He stressed that no one other than Mazzone could go out to hold press conferences about the crisis in the following days by order of Palau.
They spoke again because of the interviews Baron PP gave on the occasion of the first anniversary of the tragedy, in which he lied by denying that she had told him everything and asked him to correct it.
Regarding the story of that fateful day, Pradas revealed that before two o’clock in the afternoon, Mazzone’s chief of staff, José Manuel Cuenca, asked him to inform him of the situation and not to disturb the former president. I ignored this. At 4:29 p.m. he tried unsuccessfully to call Mazzone — “that was my tone,” he stressed — who called him again at 5:37 p.m. There he was informed of the dramatic scenario in Utel: the city mayor was asking for help from neighbors who were waiting to be rescued on their roofs, and the UME was trying to reach the city of Valencia. Mazzone asked him to tell him, but not where he was and he didn’t notice his worry either. At 6:16 p.m., Pradas also told him about the dangers of vorata.
“That afternoon, I wanted to tell him what was going on, of course. I thought that if we were informed of the possibility of a dam failure (Furata) or if we were to trigger a security alert, the state president would know. Reflecting on this later, I concluded that it was necessary for Mr. Mazzone, as the highest institutional representative of the State General, to be with us there in Sekopi.
The former president did not catch the 7:10 p.m. and 7:36 p.m., calls in which he wanted to inform him of the ES alert and the possible “immediate” failure of the dam with an affected population of 80,000 people. He did not do so, as Dana told the House committee, because he had his cell phone in his backpack. “It caused me great pain. “I immediately thought about the victims, because it was the worst moment of the afternoon,” says Pradas, crying. “I didn’t want to ask him his opinion or his assessment. Nothing stopped the ES alert from Mr. Mazzone because I could not inform him at the time the matter was discussed or when it had already been decided, because he did not answer the phone.”
He was able to speak to him at 7:47 p.m. “I think it’s active there,” he confirms, although that won’t happen until 8:10 p.m. – One minute before the alarm – when he called to say he was on his way to Iliana, where the meeting was being held. Minutes later, he asked her exactly where she wanted to go.
Polo “I couldn’t stop hesitating”
“During the afternoon, there was no mention of the Boyo Valley in Sekopi,” despite thousands of calls to 112 flood warnings in towns through which the water and mud storm passed. How could this information not reach the meeting? It is one of the big unknowns, along with the withdrawal of the firefighters who were guarding the street. “This is Suarez who has to explain it,” he noted.
On this point, Pradas contradicts the government delegate to the Valencian Community, Pilar Bernabe, who confirmed before the court that she knew and warned at 7 p.m. What was happening in Bayporta. Bernabé had seen a video of the Picania Bridge falling over Puyo, and thinking it was Bayporta, he called the mayor of this municipality, who told him about the situation they were experiencing there. Pradas denies that Bernabé provided this information and points out that in Sekopi there was a UME official from Bayporta and that its then press chief was from Benituser.
He also accused, in his opinion, the lack of information from the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) and the Jokar Hydrographic Union (CHJ). Specifically, with regard to the moment in which she said that she did not want to speak with the head of the governmental organization, Miguel Polo, she justified that she “was angry with him” because of the tension in that meeting, because he “did not stop hesitating.”