Unwarranted Insouciance

Following last week’s floods in the city and province of Valencia in eastern Spain, a spectacular blame game began between the authorities in Madrid and the regional government of Valencia. It had to be someone else’s fault that the southern suburbs of Valencia flooded so badly. It was the Spanish meteorological service in Madrid for failing to issue a severe warning early enough; it was Carlos Mazón, the president of the Valencian assembly, for not raising the alarm until twelve hours after the waters started to rise; the second deputy prime minister, Yolanda Díaz, blamed private companies for not telling workers to abandon plans to get to work. The people on the streets threw mud at the king and prime minister, who then blamed far-right extremists for the mud-slinging.

In A Life in Error (2013), a study of human mistakes – big and small, institutional and otherwise – James Reason observes that if there is a phrase that captures the essence of an unsafe culture, it is ‘unwarranted insouciance’. Spanish politicians have fallen over themselves to prove his point. More than two hundred people have died. Many others are missing. Lives and homes are ruined. Blaming others to protect your own back is all the more shocking when indulged in by government officials, regardless of where they are in the hierarchy: part of the job is to take responsibility.

An editorial in the Financial Times this week tried to take the higher ground. ‘Years of uncontrolled construction in parts of Valencia that are prone to flooding were another factor,’ the FT says. This is true, and not only of Valencia. (A story in the New York Times over the weekend says a developer wants to convert more of Brooklyn’s old docks into new housing developments. Remember Hurricane Sandy?) ‘Densely built-up areas,’ the editorial continued, ‘can help channel rainwater faster via impervious roads and pavements … The Spanish have paid a heavy price for the lack of preparedness. Global climate adaptation efforts must be given greater urgency, otherwise tragedies on this scale will only become more common.’

In 1957, the River Turia broke its banks and central Valencia flooded. Sixty people died. Franco, with dictatorial insouciance, made it his aim to ensure this would never happen again. A huge building programme, the Plan Sur, meant the Turia would be redirected out of the centre of Valencia, round to the south of the city and then into the Mediterranean. The old river bed, some said, should be turned into a huge motorway. Others objected: instead, the old course of the river, whose embankments are almost two hundred metres from one another, was made into a ribbon-like park with ponds and museums. The ancient bridges remain. The river’s new route to the sea would resemble the Los Angeles River and flow through a channel made of concrete.

Fields and farms were destroyed to make way for the colossal concrete development. The work began in 1964 and finished in 1973. The soil from the digging of the new river bed was spread over the nearby land. On 29 October this year, when three or four metres of rain fell in no time at all, the new River Turia broke its banks and flooded the southern suburbs of Valencia. So did a smaller seasonal river, the Ramblas de Poyo. Satellite images show that the land between the two rivers was the hardest hit by the flooding – the muddy flood water is everywhere in the streets of Paiporta, Benetússer, Sedaví, Alfafar and El Tremolar.

Did the slow reaction, in Madrid or in Valencia, have anything to do with over-confidence in the flood defences built fifty years ago? What better defences can be constructed? How soon will the struggle to adapt to climate change become unwinnable?

If there is a single blunt irony about the floods it was the stacks of cars in the streets of Valencian suburbs. The car is a symbol of movement, freedom, independence. It’s also emblematic of the causes of the climate emergency that is leading to ever more destruction and loss of life. Where does James Reason’s concept of unwarranted insouciance begin or end?