07.11.2024

Human wave of solidarity

As anger erupts against the complacent authorities, writes Eddie Ford, Spain’s devastating floods give us yet another terrifying glimpse of what the future holds

Over a year’s worth of rain fell within hours on October 29 in eastern Spain. The resulting floods claimed over 200 lives, with many bodies still unrecovered or unidentified, with the death toll likely to rise, as the emergency services continue to pick their way through the rubble. Some of those missing could have been swept down rivers and out to sea and many people are still without power, water and gas.

Four days earlier, an official from the state meteorological agency warned that there was a possibility of a high-impact storm - something that was initially ridiculed, with the report accused of “alarmism” on the X platform by climate change denialists and largely ignored by the authorities. On November 3, hundreds of people heckled Spain’s king and queen, as well as the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and the governor of Valencia, Carlos Mazón, when they attempted to visit one of the municipalities hardest hit - throwing mud and shouting “murderers”.

Calls rang out for the resignation of Sánchez and Mazón, the former having to be swiftly evacuated by bodyguards. Someone shouted at Felipe, “You’ve abandoned us”, demanding to know why residents had been left on their own to grapple with the aftermath of the deadly floods, and adding, “You’re four days too late”. They also confronted the monarch on why the civil protection service, which is overseen by the regional government, had sent alert warnings many hours after it had been warned of rapidly deteriorating conditions.

Given the criminally negligent lack of response from the state two days after the rains first hammered down, the catastrophic images led to a show of solidarity - a human wave of volunteers - as thousands walked miles from the less-affected areas, carrying shovels, pick axes, wheelbarrows, and food supplies. On the following day, thousands more turned up at Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences, which had been hastily converted into the nerve centre of the clean-up operation. Residents collected food from a streetside table set up by donors, some saying that they would have had nothing if not for the volunteers.

Petrol can

Of course, Valencia has a long history of disastrous floods from the 14th century up to recent times. It is situated near a riverbed on an alluvial plain, meaning that when heavy rains coincide with a convective storm, during which the sea level tends to rise, the flood risk is doubled.

Then there was the 1957 flood, caused by a three-day cold drop (gota fría) that caused the banks of the Túria river to overflow and devastated Valencia city, causing at least 81 fatalities. This forced the Franco regime to launch a plan to reroute the Túria to the south of the city centre - a measure that successfully protected the city centre, but did nothing to protect the towns to the south. In September 2019 floods killed six people in Vega Baja del Segura, leading the local government to establish ‘Valencian Emergencies’ - only for it to be closed down in 2023, on the grounds that it was a “superfluous expense”.

Yet the 2024 floods are on a totally different scale, with many calling it one of the deadliest ‘natural’ disasters in Spanish history, when in reality it was nothing of the sort - rather, it was an unnatural disaster. Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century surely shows two things: the fact that the human-caused climate crisis is starting to pick up in ferocity and regularity; and the deadly nature of the fossil fuel industry that is killing so many.¹ The catastrophic downpours were driven in part by higher temperatures in the Mediterranean - a largely enclosed sea whose warmth is a store of energy that can only be released via evaporation, creating the conditions for intense storms. In this way, the Mediterranean basin acts as a “petrol can” by feeding water vapour into the atmosphere - a process undeniably exacerbated by global warming. In fact climatologist Stefano Materia has described the Mediterranean as a “timebomb”.

Another vitally important factor is the intense urbanisation of the coastal area, as impervious surfaces like roads and buildings impede water from penetrating into the ground. Inevitably, water gathers and flash flooding results. Plus the fact that rising sea levels will further increase the drainage time to days or even weeks, which can only bring trouble.

Images

Of course, the images from Valencia and other regions of Spain are both shocking and familiar. Vehicles were swept away, as roads turned to rivers last month in Italy and before that in France; a month earlier in central Europe 24 died in floods in Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia; there were freakish downpours in England; commuters were swept off train platforms or trapped in carriages as the waters rose up to their necks during the metro line flooding disaster in China … and on and on it goes. But, with extreme-weather catastrophes becoming so commonplace, they risk becoming normalised - that in turn can induce dangerous complacency or passivity when exactly the opposite is needed.

Of course, as with the Valencia region, there have always been floods and local factors (atmospheric, geographic, economic and political) that contribute to the destructive impact. But it is the global physics of a fossil-fuel-drenched world that is loading the dice towards environmental disaster. The science is quite straightforward: the warmer the atmosphere gets, the more moisture it can hold and logically that means longer droughts and more intense downpours.

As mentioned in previous Weekly Worker articles, the scientists at the World Weather Attribution service have painstakingly compiled a record of how much more intense and likely storms, droughts, floods and fires have become, as a result of human-caused climate disruption - whether the late-summer flooding in Africa that killed more than 2,000 people and displaced millions, the floods in the south of Brazil that took more than 169 lives, or the devastating Helene and Milton hurricanes that killed at least 360 people in America and caused more than $100 billion worth of damage.

It is the poor and elderly who are the most vulnerable, of course. Many of the bodies filling the mobile morgues in Spain are those of elderly people unable to escape from their homes and delivery drivers caught in the torrents that deluged the streets. And all of this is happening with ‘just’ 1.3ºC of global warming, so what might happen with temperatures of 3.1ºC or more is quite frankly terrifying.

Beginning to run out of vocabulary, UN secretary-general António Guterres has declared “code red for humanity” and the organisation’s executive climate secretary, Simon Stiell, warned “we have two years to save the world”. Then only last week the head of the UN environment programme, Inger Andersen, said “it’s climate crunch time for real”. Yet, crazily, the agenda for Cop29 in Baku next week is being set by those who want to expand fossil fuel production ... as does the ‘drill, baby drill,’ president elect in the US. Trump, will also, in probability, once again, withdraw America from international climate agreements.

Azerbaijan is the third climate conference host in a row, after the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, that plans to increase oil and gas production, while next year’s host, Brazil, also intends to boost output.This rampant corruption underlines why the Climate Justice Coalition’s march in central London on November 12 should be supported. The organisers say the climate crisis and genocide in Gaza are “inextricably linked.” They demand an end to both.²

People not cars

Meanwhile, an action plan is needed that everyone knows how to implement, having received the appropriate training and education. In that sense, we need a military-style approach. After all, death tolls will always be high when a heat record is broken or a region experiences hurricane-scale forces of rain, as in Spain - we should hardly be taken by surprise every time.

Of course, the emergency and civil protection services should get the resources they need. But, far more urgently still, governments have to be made to stop building in the same old way. Nowadays, almost everywhere in Europe where most people live, rivers are canalised, and all surfaces are sealed with concrete and asphalt to make a city comfortable for cars - not people. Instead, rivers need space again, so that they have somewhere else to go rather than into people’s homes!

In other words, we need to practice survival in a climate-changed world, some of which is outlined in the CPGB’s Draft programme (‘3.3. environmental crisis’).³ Like rapidly transitioning away from coal, oil, gas and nuclear power towards wind, tidal, solar, geothermal and other renewables, along with restoring natural floodplains, marshes and rewilding large swathes of the countryside. Fens and heath land should be re-established and we should strive to reintroduce the full array of native flora and fauna - returning to nature the grouse moors, deer-stalking estates and upland sheep runs.

As for towns and cities, we say they should be full of trees, roof gardens, planted walls, allotments, wild parks and small-scale cooperative farms. Concrete jungles, urban sprawl, and using rivers and seas as common sewers - all this is an obscenity that must end, as should huge farms and intensive meat and dairy production that result in substantial damage to the biosphere.