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Spain
braces for new storms as flooding disaster’s political fallout continues
King Felipe
VI reportedly plans to revisit Valencia amid alerts for heavy rain, high waves
and strong winds
Jonathan
Watts in Barcelona
Tue 12 Nov
2024 17.43 CET
People in
flood-hit Spain stacked sandbags and braced for new storms on Tuesday as the
political repercussions from last month’s deadly climate disaster rumbled on.
Amid fresh
weather warnings, local media reported that King Felipe VI would soon return to
the site of the flash floods, after he was pelted with mud and eggs on his
first visit last week owing to local fury at the poor preparation and response
of the authorities.
More than
100,000 protesters took to the streets at the weekend and there have also been
calls for the resignations of rightwing local government leaders, who ignored
warnings and blocked measures to address the growing risks posed by
human-caused climate disruption. A further protest was held in Barcelona on
Tuesday.
Eight
Spanish areas were once again put on alert on Tuesday for heavy rain, high
waves, and strong winds in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, just
two weeks after the downpours that killed at least 214 people.
The storm is
not expected to be as powerful but the impact of the rain could be severe
because of the quantities of mud already on the ground and the condition of the
sewage system, Rosa Tauris, a spokesperson for Valencia’s emergency committee,
told reporters.
In many
areas, thousands of children had only just returned to school on Monday, and
road clearance and rebuilding work is still under way with support from
thousands of military personnel.
A year’s
worth of rain lashed down in less than eight hours on 29 October, devastating
infrastructure, wrecking crops and causing damage expected to rise to tens of
billions of euros.
In what is
an increasingly familiar pattern worldwide, scientists had long warned that
storms would grow in intensity and frequency as a result of human burning of
gas, oil, coal and trees; meteorologists issued alerts in the hours and days
before the deluge; and politicians failed to act with sufficient urgency,
leading to a furious public backlash.
Protesters
have called for the resignation of the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez,
and the Valencia region’s conservative leader, Carlos Mazon, accusing them of
negligence and murder because public alerts came too late.
Sánchez has
acknowledged the need for a political reckoning once the danger has passed and
the clean-up work is completed. “Later will come the political debate about
what things we must improve in the face of this climate emergency,” he said on
Monday as his government passed a second emergency relief package worth almost
€3.8bn (£3.15bn).
Such scenes
are likely to become more common across the world. The UN recently warned that
global average temperature rise was approaching 1.5C above preindustrial
levels, which would put the world on course for a catastrophic rise of 2.6-3.1C
this century, unless there are immediate and big cuts to greenhouse gas
emissions. “A failure to act will lead to increasingly frequent and dangerous
extreme weather events,” said the world body.
At the
opening of Cop29 in Baku on Monday, this message was underscored by the UN
climate summit’s president, Mukhtar Babayev, who said the recent disasters in
Valencia and elsewhere showed climate breakdown was already here. “We are on a
road to ruin,” the former oil executive said in his address. “People are
suffering in the shadows; they are dying in the dark.”
Jim Skea,
the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the conference
that disasters would become commonplace without urgent action to cut emissions.
“This is the new normal. Imagine what is in store in the coming decades, if we
do not act swiftly and decisively. With every fraction of a degree of global
warming, we face greater threats,” he said.
Pope Francis
underscored the link during an address in the Vatican at the weekend when he
expressed hope that Cop29 would make “an effective contribution to our common
home”, followed immediately by his wish for people to pray for the residents of
Valencia
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