Spanish floods highlight the muck of capitalism
King Felipe of Spain, along with the Spanish prime minister and the Valencian president, visited the flood-ravaged town of Paiporta on 3 November. They were greeted by crowds of angry residents chanting “Murderer!” and had mud thrown at them.
The furious reception was in response to disastrous floods in the Valencia region in late October. The floods, caused by massive rainfall—in some locations a year’s worth of rain fell in eight hours—were the worst natural disaster in Spain in decades. More than 215 people have been killed and about 1,900 are missing.
This part of Spain typically receives a lot of rain at this time of year, but as global temperatures rise, the air carries more moisture, leading to more extreme events.
While the flooding is a result of climate change, the death toll is a product of neglect. The day before the downpour, the meteorological agency issued warnings, which the regional government of Valencia largely ignored.
It was only at 8pm on the day of the floods that the government sent a warning to every mobile phone, instructing people to stay at home or move to higher ground. By this time, flood waters had already hit many towns, trapping people in their houses or in cars on their way home after work.
One young man berated the King: “It was known, and nobody did anything to avoid it”.
In line with other disasters, such as Hurricane Helene, there seem to have been several cases of bosses preventing their workers from leaving work early to seek safety. One widely shared video shows a delivery driver for Mercadona, one of Spain’s major supermarket chains, being saved by rescue workers.
After the floods, Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, was confronted by angry shoppers at a supermarket. “You have no shame. You sent your workers out to die”, one said. Graffiti reading “Your profits, our dead” summarises the sentiment.
The Valencia Emergency Unit, which had been created to coordinate emergency responses, had been disbanded as a part of budget cuts by the conservative regional government last year. The government also initially refused help from firefighting agencies from other parts of Spain and France in an effort to show that it had everything under control. This left some of the worst affected areas without heavy machinery for up to six days.
One consequence is that residents have had to organise the cleaning effort themselves. One, Ana Isabel Zomeno, told ABC News: “The street here was full of piled cars. Nobody came here, but all the neighbours in this street have organised themselves very well to do the clean-up. It looks this clean now because of us”.
People throughout Spain have donated supplies. Volunteers from the region have travelled around to help others clean up. On one day when the government put a call out, up to 15,000 people volunteered to help.
Video shows mud everywhere. It carpets the ground and is caked onto walls. The people are covered in it—from the flood and from cleaning up afterwards.
The visiting politicians, and even the king, ended up covered in it too, for different reasons. That was one piece of good news coming out of this disaster.
