Summers are hard these days in my home town of Madrid, Spain. Like many other madrileños, I head to the coast for milder temperatures and a cool splash in the sea. The ‘Comunidad Valenciana’ in the east of the country offers a nearby escape. The beaches are beautiful and sandy and there are plenty of things to entertain the whole family.
This year however as I stepped my bare feet in the sea there was no cooling down. The water was noticeably warm, warmer than I had ever felt it. And with that, the leisurely feeling of the summer day evaporated to be replaced by the now habitual ominous version. Jaws music playing in my head, waiting for something horrible to happen.
Fast forward a couple of months and over 200 people who lost their lives in Spain’s biggest natural catastrophe ever recorded bring me to tears as my fears play out on the TV screen. Not in some faraway country, but lapping at the steps of my own home. These could be my parents, my family, my friends.
On October 29th, a DANA (from the Spanish Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos, or High-Altitude Depression)—which had been predicted by the Spanish meteorological service—descended on the area. A DANA occurs when a mass of warm air collides with a stagnant mass of cold air at an altitude of around 9,000 meters, sometimes causing torrential rain. This phenomenon, traditionally called Gota Fria (cold drop), is well known and frequent on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.
What was unusual was the viciousness of last month’s incident. The area received the same amount of rain they would normally see in a year in only a few hours, reaching 700 litres/m2 in some places (one of the highest levels ever recorded), and flooding around 530 km2 towards the south of the city of Valencia. On top of the hundreds of dead, there are over 190,000 people affected and 1,500 km of roads and 99 km of rail damaged with an estimated cost of 20.584m euros.
So when the ‘expected unexpected’ happened in my home country, I thought: well, maybe this would finally make more people understand. Now it will be clear that we need to act decisively to mitigate climate change and adapt to the effects of it, so that we and our children can live in a world where we are actually safe. Maybe we can seriously plan to curb fossil fuel use, rethink the way we grow our food and how much we consume. Maybe we can unite, together, to start creating the change that can still take us to a future that is not more of this, every month, every year.
Yet that is not what I see. No one seems to doubt that climate change has made this event more catastrophic. Yet this fact remains somehow in the realm of theory. Because when it comes to deciding what to do next, to define what we do with the anger of those people who have lost loved ones, those who are losing everything they have and those of us who are standing by while wondering when and where it will happen next, we turn around and blame each other.
Which politician was most at fault? Was it the regional Valencian government led by Carlos Mazon, with its hard-fought-for authority yet lack of presence in the emergency response? Or was it Pedro Sanchez’s central government who did not deploy the army in time? The frustration at street level was clear when the King of Spain, the president of the country, and the President of the Generalitat (the regional government) visited the area in the days following the storm and were received with shouts of ‘murderers’.
The frustration and pain are understandable. But I think we are missing a piece of the puzzle. No one is stepping away from this turmoil, turning around and pointing a finger at the fossil fuel companies which have literally fuelled this catastrophe, such as Spain’s very own Repsol, who was last week in the courts for greenwashing after claiming to be a ‘leader in the energetic transition.’ They are a small part of an industry that causes 73.2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Moving forward we need to take steps for a safer future. Designing better storm and flooding plans is a priority, but if we do not acknowledge the role of these companies and the damage their products create, we will be fighting an uphill battle that’s impossible to win.
And when it comes to pay, why should the Spanish taxpayer have to bear the brunt of the cost of rebuilding after suffering devastating losses? When a fossil fuel company causes a spill, they have to clean it up. Why not here? Why don’t they have to pay, using the record-breaking profits they have made in the last few years?
Over the coming decades, climate change will continue to have a huge effect on Spain, one of many nations that lives on a knife edge when it comes to water. We swerve between droughts and floods, attempting to manage the competing requirements of our citizens and sectors such as agriculture and industry. And with a GDP made up of 13% tourism and 2% agriculture, both sectors are highly impacted by the changing weather.
Will this tragedy bring us closer to waking up and taking the bold steps required to keep us safe? Or will we continue with the easier narrative that keeps those on top unscathed and those who suffer struggling to make sense of what has happened and unable to prepare for what is coming?
Photo credit: Casey Hugelfink on Flickr (a 1% for the Planet member)
