MADRID: One year after historic floods killed 229 people in Valencia, the Spanish region’s leader Carlos Mazon has faced mounting criticism over his handling of the disaster and defied calls to resign.
The eastern region bordering the Mediterranean had woken up under the highest red alert for torrential rain on October 29 last year.
But for five hours, the conservative Mazon, 51, was absent from the front line of an emergency response widely condemned as inadequate.
Above all, the late sending of a mass telephone alert to residents at 8:11 p.m. sparked fierce scrutiny of his agenda and a debate about whether that delayed potentially life-saving action.
“If Mazon had really been where he should have been, the alarm would have arrived on time,” leftist MP Agueda Mico, of the regionalist Compromis party, said on Tuesday.
