Catastrophic floods in Spain on Oct. 29 killed at least 229 people and caused billions of euros’ worth of damage. The hardest-hit region was Valencia, a wealthy, industrious province in the country’s northeast, where at least 221 people died—many of them carried away in their cars or drowned in underground garages.
A few days after the floods, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited the worst-affected parts of Valencia, alongside Spain’s Socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and Valencia’s conservative regional president, Carlos Mazón. The delegation was pelted with mudballs and insults by citizens furious at what they saw as state negligence before, during, and after the disaster.
Sánchez has since deployed 17,000 troops and police and pledged €16.6 billion (around $17.5 billion) to Valencia, but the cleanup operation was initially led by thousands of volunteers, including members of far-right fringe groups eager to exploit anger with the establishment.
Their presence amid the mud and carnage in Valencia was undoubtedly opportunistic. In European Union elections this spring, a new anti-establishment party, Se Acabó La Fiesta (“The Party Is Over”), gained its first seats in Brussels, fueled by popular anger at a political class seen by many Spaniards—and not just those who back fringe groups—as hopelessly corrupt and self-serving.
Mazón and Sánchez have been quick to blame each other for the scale of the disaster. Mazón, a member of the center-right People’s Party (PP), says the central government should have intervened in the rescue operation faster, whereas Sánchez points to the fact that, in Spain, emergency response is regional administrations’ responsibility.
Both politicians’ arguments ultimately rest on the premise that this was a freak weather occurrence, almost impossible to predict or contain. Sánchez said the floods were brutal proof that “climate change kills.” Mazón, who is under pressure from his electorate to resign, has called them “apocalyptic” and claimed that “there [was] no previous reference or experience that could be remotely comparable [to this disaster].”
To an extent, this is true. Although Valencia has experienced severe floods before, the scale of damage and loss of life on Oct. 29 made it one of the country’s worst ever natural disasters. However, there is a recent precedent elsewhere in Europe, comparable in almost all details to the Spanish floods.
The similarities between what happened—or failed to happen—in central Europe in the summer of 2021 and the recent floods in Spain show that national and regional Spanish leaders had the opportunity to absorb and implement lessons from other floods but failed to do so. In an attempt to cover up their failures, they have turned the disaster into fodder for a political blame game—from which both sides have emerged as losers.
In July 2021, heavy rainfall caused severe flooding across central Europe, causing 243 deaths. The worst-affected countries were Germany and Belgium, where 196 and 43 people were killed, respectively. Before critics could blame authorities for poor preparation, Belgian Interior Minister Annelies Verlinden said there was “no script for a water bomb [like this]. … It is an illusion to think that everything can be planned or prepared.”
Higher temperatures mean the air can hold more moisture, resulting in greater risk of droughts and heavy rainfall. According to the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group, the rains in Valencia were 12 percent heavier and twice as likely than in the preindustrial era, when the atmosphere was around 1.3 degrees cooler. Back in 2021, WWA stated that climate change had rendered the floods in Belgium and Germany up to nine times more likely.
In both cases, though, politicians displayed more concern about climate change after the event, when seeking to deflect or apportion blame. In the wake of the 2021 floods, Pierre Ozer, a leading Belgian climatologist, said he’d been predicting extreme rainfall in the region for decades with no tangible government action.
Comments such as his highlight the danger that governments face in blaming extreme weather events on climate change: They open themselves up to criticism for not heeding scientists’ warnings. But Ozer’s complaint also points to the need for better communication between scientists and governments about the effects of climate change, the timescales involved, and the measures to minimize damage.
Experts and parties with a green agenda also appear to have been sidelined in Spain. Mazon has ignored repeated warnings from Compromis, a regional leftist alliance, on the “increasing risks of flooding in the Mediterranean,” where the sea temperature is rising twenty times faster than the global average. After taking office last July, initially in partnership with the right-wing Vox party (which quit the regional coalition this June), Mazon’s PP-led coalition dismantled an emergency response unit set up by Valencia’s previous Socialist government, which it described as a “shady outfit.”
This specialist force could have been first on the scene after the Oct. 29 floods. Sánchez not explicitly attacking the PP for this decision might seem like a wasted opportunity for political point-scoring—until one remembers that a member of his own cabinet is under fire for similar reasons.
Teresa Ribera, who was Spain’s environment minister in October and who has just taken up a new post as the EU’s commissioner for energy and competition, was heavily criticized by the PP after the floods. A project to channel Valencia’s Poyo ravine, which caused some of the worst flash flooding in October, was designed in 2006 and classified as a priority in 2009 by Spain’s Hydrographic Confederation. It was shelved by successive Spanish administrations despite hydrographic experts repeatedly stressing its importance.
Ribera finally canceled the project in 2021, just two months after the central European floods, for being too expensive and environmentally interventionist. Outraged by what it sees as Ribera’s negligence, the PP voted against her appointment as EU commissioner. This isolated act of rebellion wasn’t enough to prevent Ribera from taking up the powerful EU post on Dec. 1—but the new Commission received the least amount of votes from the European Parliament than any other in more than 30 years.
Spain, especially its regional governments, could also have learned from how meteorological agencies reacted to criticism of their warning systems after the 2021 floods. The European Environment Agency said the scale of damage in Germany and Belgium was largely due to ineffective centralized alert systems.
But Armin Schuster, then head of Germany’s Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance, suggested the real problem was not the lack of prior meteorological information but the reactions by authorities and citizens. Similarly, Mazón partially blames his delayed response on AEMET, Spain’s national weather agency, claiming that it failed to issue warnings sufficiently far in advance.
Despite the criticism, data about imminent deluges was available to politicians in Belgium and Germany in 2021 and in Spain in 2024. The European Flood Awareness System and the German Weather Service both issued warnings of heavy downpours several days in advance of the European floods. In Spain, AEMET warned of torrential rainfall in Valencia five days before the disaster—and at 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 29, it put the entire region under red alert.
Yet this information didn’t prompt regional governments to take preemptive action in any of the flooding scenarios. By the time the mayor of Liège—one of the worst-affected cities in Belgium—called for an evacuation, many of its streets were already under water.
In Spain, Mazón gave a press conference at 1 p.m. on Oct. 29, announcing that the storm would lose much of its intensity by 6 p.m.—and then reportedly went to lunch for five hours with a journalist. The Valencia leader has yet to explain what forecast he was referring to in that announcement. Citizens didn’t receive extreme weather alerts on their phones until just after 8 p.m., by which point the floods were already causing havoc.
Another issue flagged by the 2021 floods was how to interpret weather warnings, even if they’re received on time. According to a poll of residents in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, the worst-affected German states, 85 percent of people who received warnings said they didn’t expect severe flooding, and 46 percent said they didn’t know what protective measures to take.
Liz Stephens, a professor of climate risks and resilience at Reading University in the United Kingdom, says that while AEMET’s red alert for Valencia was issued sufficiently far in advance, the actions required weren’t clear. Red alerts advise citizens not to travel unless necessary—but with no specific guidelines, such as not moving cars out of underground garages.
The Spanish Civil Guard’s video on X showing people how to escape from submerged vehicles, published on Oct. 30, missed the point, but not just because it was a day too late. Effective weather alerts should prevent people from finding themselves in submerged cars in the first place.
The 2021 European floods also sparked a debate about which state institutions bear most of the responsibility for natural disaster response. Given that Germany is a highly decentralized country, with emergency response managed by each of its 16 federal states rather than from Berlin, this could’ve also been a lesson for Spain.
Horst Seehofer, Germany’s interior minister at the time of the floods, said it was local governments’ responsibility to make emergency response decisions because central management of natural disasters would be unrealistic. Sánchez similarly claimed that coordinating the response to Valencia’s floods from Madrid would have reduced efficiency. Spain’s Military Emergency Unit (UME), which has sent more than 2,000 troops to the worst-hit regions, has also defended itself against accusations of a sluggish response.
The UME’s chief, Javier Marcos, said he “can’t go into [to a disaster zone], legally, without authorization from the head of the emergency”—in this case, Mazón. The Valencia leader has been attacked for not immediately raising the level or alert from two to three, which would have forced the central government and UME to intervene. Instead, he has kept it at two, only informally requesting support from Sánchez. Despite the state resources that have since been pumped into the region, Mazón’s government remains in official charge of the cleanup and recovery operation.
The PP’s national leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has said Sánchez needn’t have waited for Valencia’s cry for help. The Socialist leader could have seized control by declaring a state of alarm, the mechanism by which he imposed a lockdown in March 2020 due to the spread of COVID-19, or a state of emergency.
Vox leader Santiago Abascal has said Sánchez’s apparent unwillingness to lead the recovery effort in Valencia demonstrates the “evil and incompetence” of the Socialist-led government. Yet he has said nothing about the role that Mazón’s errors of judgment have played in the disaster.
Perhaps it is impossible to ever be completely prepared for “water bombs” like those that fell on central Europe in 2021 and Valencia in 2024. But because Spain is now having the same debate about institutional responsibilities that Germany had in 2021, it seems that the political fallout from the European floods did not lead to constructive institutional change.
The blame game raging within the Spanish establishment will not save any lives when the continent receives its next downpour. The only thing that will do that is a careful study of what happened—and what failed to happen—in order to better prepare for the future. The lessons are there, just as they were after the 2021 floods: Now it’s time to actually learn them.
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