The Mass Deaths in Spain Aren’t Just a Natural Disaster
At least 95 people died in flash floods in eastern Spain on Tuesday. Far fewer could have died in the Valencia region if its right-wing government had prepared civil protection measures — and if bosses hadn’t insisted that workers come into work.
Cars are piled in the street with other debris after flash floods hit the region on October 30, 2024, in Valencia, Spain. (David Ramos / Getty Images)
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. They have gambled with our lives.”
A further eight hundred workers in an industrial park were trapped in precarious conditions, with many having to climb onto the roofs of warehouses to escape danger. From there, some called their families to say goodbye in what they believed to be their final hours. They were later rescued. In other dramatic footage, a supermarket delivery driver was rescued by a helicopter as his truck was semisubmerged in water — with much of the media blurring the well-known corporate logo of Mercadona in photos so as to avoid reputational damage to the Spanish company. Like many others, it decided to keep its workers in the field even after the country’s national meteorological office issued a red alert for extreme weather that morning.
In this respect, the Valencia floods offer a tragic example of what it means when unscrupulous bosses, vicious neoliberalism, and policies of far-right denialists intersect with a climate-related disaster. As journalist Daniel Bernabé notes, “Putting profit before life is not permissible, but it also explains the principles that govern our society.”
A Negligent Response
This was a point further underscored by images inside of an outsourced public nursing home that showed elderly people desperately wading through floodwaters, with few if any staff members visible. Six residents died in the home, which is one of twenty-two run by the corrupt construction magnate Enrique Ortiz.
Yet beyond that, questions are being asked why emergency protocols were not put into place in time. In particular, the hard-right regional government is coming under fierce criticism for its failure to issue a civil protection alert to residents’ cell phones until 8:15 p.m. on Tuesday evening — by which time thousands were already trapped by rising floodwaters. “If the Valencian government had activated and communicated the alert — which inevitably reaches every citizen in possession of a cell phone — earlier, there would probably have been fewer deaths,” insisted left-wing former minister Alberto Garzón.
Premier Carlos Mazón, of the right-wing Partido Popular, also waited until 8:30 p.m. to formally request the assistance of the national Military Emergency Unit and resisted calling a state of emergency as it would have meant handing over authority to the central government in Madrid, headed by Pedro Sánchez’s broad-left coalition. He also tweeted at noon Tuesday that the worst of the storm would have passed by 6 p.m.
In part, this reflected his administration’s broader laissez faire approach to climate change, with his coalition government agreement with the far-right Vox in 2023 including the elimination of the recently set up Valencian Emergency Response Unit. As journalist Antonio Maestre wrote on Wednesday, that one of Mazón’s first executive actions was to abolish that unit “conveys the message that nothing is wrong, that the climate crisis will not affect us and that there is no need to worry about what that paradigm shift entails for the lives of thousands of people.”
Vox pulled out of Mazón’s administration this summer over the existential threat that unaccompanied migrant children supposedly pose to law and order in Spain. Yet in the days leading up to the floods, the online alt-right heaped scorn on the meteorological office’s repeated warnings of expected extreme rainfall. Even in the immediate aftermath, Vox officials gave voice to conspiracy theories circulating in social media, which claimed that the current broad-left national government has removed hundreds of dams built under dictator Francisco Franco.
Capitalism Kills
Sumar’s left-wing labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, has insisted that businesses who pressured workers to remain in their jobs will be prosecuted. “I call on companies to comply with the law and preserve the lives of workers,” she said. “What is happening is very serious. Spanish companies know that the legislation in force has protection mechanisms [for workers in the case of natural disasters].”
As with the pandemic, there was a clear class dimension to the uneven risks assumed by workers — with many retail and blue-collar employees not given an option of leaving work early. “We have put our necks on the line to sell four early bird menus,” one waitress told Spain’s public broadcaster. “They didn’t let us go until we received the cell phone alert but by then it was already too late.”
Garzón also points to other structural elements that have added to the chaos, such as the mass building projects in floodplains around Valencia’s periphery. “During the decades of speculative urban development and the real estate bubble, i.e. since at least the 1960s, city planning policy has dispensed with the advice of ecologists, geographers and other professionals who know about natural cycles and their disturbances,” he writes. “In general, easy economic profit, the drive to attract tourists and other common tendencies prevailed over an understanding of the risks involved in not accepting our subaltern position vis-à-vis nature.”
This is a point echoed by the environmentalist collective Ecologistas en Acción. In a statement, it argued that “the climate crisis forces us to rethink the design of infrastructure conceived decades ago and that is not prepared for these types of extraordinary events, which will be increasingly recurrent and intense.” If the Right’s response to such events is to continue dismantling state capacities, engage in denialism, and scapegoat migrants, progressives need to be able to project an alternative horizon that offers the social majority a tangible sense of security and social protection.
At times Spain’s coalition government has sought to move in that direction since coming to power in 2020. But over the last year its reformist agenda has seemed increasingly exhausted by internal crises and a weakened parliamentary majority. The Valencian floods point to what the alternative coalition of a radicalized right would mean for a country facing massive climate-related challenges in the coming years: an embrace of disaster nationalism.