The deputy director general of Emergencies of the Valencian Generalitat, Jorge Suárez Torres, has attributed the delay in sending the Es-Alert alert to the population during the DANA to the need to have the endorsement of political officials, which, as he has acknowledged, delayed the activation of the warning at a critical moment. “It took time because that political endorsement was needed”, he stated during his appearance, within the framework of the open investigations into the management of the episode.
During his intervention, the technical manager explained that the procedure did not depend exclusively on operational criteria, but rather that required prior validation by political instances. This circumstance, he indicated, conditioned the response times in an emergency situation marked by the rapid evolution of meteorological phenomena.
Suárez Torres has appeared before the Congressional investigative committee focused on the management of the DANA, where he has been specifically questioned about the moment in which it was decided to activate the Es-Alert system and about the temporal margin between the detection of the risk and the effective sending of the alert to the population.
The head of Emergencies has framed this operation within the current protocols in the Valencian Community, which establish the need to validate certain warnings before their dissemination to the population, even in rapidly evolving scenarios like the one recorded during that episode.
