Floodwaters in Valencia on October 29 caused devastation before any emergency alerts were issued. Photo / Michael Robinson Chávez via the Washington Post
VALENCIA, Spain – The floodwaters charged downhill on October 29, roaring through ravines, churning with debris, and then deluging neighbourhoods that had been given no warning.
At 6pm, a family caught in the raging waters tried clinging to iron window bars outside their home; by 6.30, only one person – 70-year-old Dolores Ruiz – was still hanging on.
At 6.53pm, a pregnant 26-year-old coming home from work called her mother to say that water was entering the car and that she’d try to escape to the roof.
At 7.57pm, a drowning widower spoke with his daughter, who urged him to move to higher ground but heard him say just before the call cut off, “I can’t, sweetheart, I can’t”.
And then, at 8.11pm, smartphones across the region buzzed with the first emergency alert from the regional Government, warning of the risk from heavy rains. By then, much of Valencia was already underwater.
In the immediate aftermath of the floods that killed at least 228, Valencians knew that the official response had gone terribly wrong.
Now, Spain is asking whether the mismanagement was not just catastrophic but criminal.
Over the past few months, a judge has been interviewing survivors and collecting phone records and text messages while summoning insiders to testify about what happened behind the scenes.
Already, Judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra – whose own courthouse was flooded – has placed two politicians involved with the emergency response under investigation and is weighing whether to indict them on charges of reckless homicide and reckless injury.
The premise of the investigation is stark: that many of the deaths were preventable.
“A failure,” the judge wrote in court documents about the delayed alert. The deaths and devastation “all occurred amid the clear inaction of the regional administration”.
In exploring criminal charges, Spain is now testing how far a democracy can go in holding officials accountable after an extreme natural disaster.
Experts caution that it is difficult – and exceedingly rare – to prosecute decision-makers for their actions in frantic moments.
Even after Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 – which was marked by delayed evacuations and aid delivery – nobody faced prosecution for their direct handling of the response.
After deadly floods in 2021, Germany considered charging a district leader with negligent homicide but ultimately dropped the case.
“The gross negligence would have to be enormous,” said David Abramson, director of New York University’s Centre for Public Health Disaster Science.
But the case in Spain stands out because the disaster, for all its enormity, was also “foreseeable”, according to the judge.
Valencia has a long history of floods.
The mountains to the west, and a network of downhill ravines, put the coastal city in the crosshairs.
Spain’s meteorological agency had warned four days earlier that a big storm would form on the Mediterranean coast.
And on the morning of the flooding – at 8.04am – the agency amped up its advisory, writing, “Extreme caution! The danger is extreme!”
Valencia’s biggest university pre-emptively cancelled classes.
Then came the rain, one of the most powerful bursts in European history.
It was part of a weather pattern that plays out dangerously in Spain in the autumn, when cold air from the North Atlantic converges with the warm and humid air over the Mediterranean.
In this instance, sea temperatures were unusually high; scientists estimated that human-caused climate change had intensified the rainfall by about 12%.
The rain first pummelled Utiel, a town about 65km west of Valencia. Then, starting at around 4pm, the skies unleashed over the town of Chiva, about 32km away, an area that feeds the ravines leading downhill to Valencia.
By then, the event had been set in motion.
“You have just a few hours” to get ready, said Felix Frances, a hydrologist at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
A torrent of water was rushing toward Valencia’s southern suburbs.
In those areas, it hadn’t even rained.
Of everything that went wrong that day, it’s the late alert that provokes the most anger and haunts flood survivors. “It’s like, how dare you send me this now?” said Gonzalo Leon, a lawyer at the Vilches law firm, who represents victims.
Mary Rodriguez, the mother of the pregnant 26-year-old who drowned after climbing from her car, says an earlier alert might have kept her daughter off the road.
Instead, Rodriguez is consumed with grief, has taken leave from work and sees a counsellor every day. She clings to the baby clothing of a girl who would have been named Scarlett.
Toni Garcia says a quicker alert would have prevented her husband and 24-year-old daughter from going into their apartment building’s basement garage, hoping to move their cars – just as a tsunami-like wall of water flooded the garage and the floor above.
She replays a conversation she had earlier that day with her worried daughter. Garcia’s advice: keep checking your phone.
Ruiz, the 70-year-old who clung to the window bars, says if the alert had come several hours sooner, her husband, Emeterio, 74, and her sons Andres, 46, and Javier, 42, might still be alive.
They would have grabbed a few belongings, left their single-storey home and walked to the next house down the street, which belongs to her sister, taking refuge on the second floor.
Instead, when they tried to escape their home, the water was already a furious churn. They could barely make it outside, and they abandoned all plans, all reason – just clinging to the windows, submerged up to their necks, pelted by debris.
There, over a span of minutes, Ruiz witnessed an inconceivable chain reaction. Andres lost his dog to the floodwaters and plunged into the rapids after it.
Then Javier saw his brother getting pulled away and let go of the window bar to follow. Finally, Emeterio released his hold as well, hoping to save his sons.
“These things you can’t explain in that moment,” Ruiz said.
Ruiz remembers little of those minutes other than feeling shocked, keeping her grip for several hours, until finally the water receded, the crashing noises relented, and her sister shouted from her second-floor balcony: “I think there’s a path”.
The sister, Ana, remembers Ruiz showing up bruised, trembling, unable to unclench her hands.
Ruiz asked her sister, “Why didn’t I let go?”
“It’s not your time,” Ana said.
Spain’s decentralised system gives regions the power to manage emergencies, so Valencia’s flood response hinged on the centre-right Government of Carlos Mazon.
For the crucial two-pronged job of running the justice system and handling emergencies, Mazon had picked former Spanish senator and lawyer Salome Pradas.
Mazon saw her as a “party loyalist” who would help him keep peace with the far-right, whose support his fragile Government depended on, said Anna Lopez, a Valencian political scientist.
But Pradas, one of the people now under investigation, has since testified that she had “no experience or knowledge” related to emergencies.
Lawyers representing flood survivors say Pradas’ biggest mistake was waiting until 5pm to call a meeting of emergency responders – establishing a de facto command centre.
Had those officials been convened earlier, they might have conveyed to Pradas some of the obvious warning signs: how calls to Spain’s emergency 112 hotline were soaring from the mid-afternoon, and how the flow rate in the normally dry Rambla del Poyo ravine started to climb from 5.30pm, quickly skyrocketing to historic levels.
Pradas could have even got a sense of the situation by turning on the TV, where a journalist at 6pm was reporting from flooded Chiva, describing “devastating” water and fast-flowing ravines.
“The problem did not lie in the absence of information – there was more than enough of it, from countless sources, in real time,” the judge wrote.
When the meeting finally convened, leaders from various emergency departments took turns giving briefings, said Pilar Bernabe, the Spanish Government’s representative in Valencia, who took part in the meeting. Only at 7pm, according to Pradas’ account, did participants begin talking about the alert.
“She started late,” Bernabe said of Pradas. “Everything happened late that day.”
Pradas declined an interview request. But the Washington Post spoke with her lawyers and reviewed a summary of Pradas’ courtroom testimony. That account portrays a day of confusion in which accurate warnings might have been available – but weren’t conveyed by technical experts.
Pradas told the court that she hadn’t known the Poyo ravine was overflowing. Instead, she said, the Spanish agency that monitors the Valencian basin was far more preoccupied with the potential risk of an inland dam failure.
Indeed, when Valencia issued the alert, it was with the dam – a danger that never came to fruition – in mind.
Pradas blamed the monitoring agency, the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation, and said it had “raised issues that could lead the technicians to make mistakes”.
The confederation did not respond to a request for comment.
Spain’s alert system, activated in 2023, had never been used in Valencia aside from a few test runs.
When the flood alert was finally issued, at 8.11pm, it advised to avoid “all types of travel” but did not urge movement to higher ground – an omission emergency experts criticised. The judge called the alert “painful in its delay and incomplete in its content”.
Mazon fired Pradas one month after the flood and announced a new ministry focused solely on emergencies. Sandra Imedio, one of Pradas’ lawyers, portrayed her as a scapegoat and said she is “destroyed on a psychological level”.
For many, it is Mazon’s absence from the case that is particularly striking. As a regional president, he can only be tried by a higher court. The judge has offered Mazon the chance to testify, but he has not done so.
Survivors who lost relatives in the flood widely view Mazon as complicit in the delayed response, and one major victims’ association explicitly names him as the person most responsible.
They say he undermined a sense of urgency on the day of the disaster by carrying on with his regularly planned schedule – first receiving a certificate for tourism, then holding budget talks.
At around 1pm, he gave a news conference and wrongly predicted that the storms would “decrease in intensity” by 6. He subsequently went for a three-hour lunch with a reporter.
Manuel Mata, one of the lawyers representing the survivors, said he has tried to imagine Pradas’ position that day – deliberating over a dire alert for several million people, while her own boss didn’t seem to be in emergency mode.
Mazon has since said that he would not “shirk criticism” and that the “whole system failed”.
He has faced monthly mass-scale protests calling for his resignation.
“I think the problem is Mazon,” Mata said. “It’s like a battle of the army. You need a general to take decisions.”
Ruiz had been a stay-at-home mother who rarely travelled and kept a garden with tomatoes, peppers and potatoes – a small, simple life that is now in pieces.
Seven months later, she says she is “alive, but dead inside”.
She has moved back into a city apartment she’d bought as a newlywed. She has set up pictures of Emeterio, Javier, and Andres on a dining table – and eats her meals while looking at them.
“I want to be at home with them,” she says. “It feels good to talk with them and cry.”
She also marches in protests against the Valencian Government. She wears a shirt with her sons’ faces on it. She says they are victims of “negligence” and “homicide”.
And on March 5, she met for several hours with the judge.
She showed the judge photos of her old home, the one she was too traumatised to return to. Rooms caked in mud. A tree trunk gouging a window. The judge asked questions about the timeline of the day.
“It took time because I kept crying,” Ruiz said.
Days later, the judge issued a 16-page court document announcing the investigation. That document includes a long account of events leading up to the alert, including vivid personal anecdotes – Ruiz’s family is first in the list.
Ruiz’s experience in the floodwaters in October had started as a personal tragedy.
Now, it is evidence.
Exactly what caused flight 171 to fall back to Earth will be investigated.