The wolf has arrived this week in Lanzarote and, as in the story, the worst thing is that now nobody expected it. What happened last Tuesday is not the fault of the rain. It is true that the amount of water was high and that it was concentrated in a ...
The wolf has arrived this week in Lanzarote and, as in the story, the worst thing is that now nobody expected it. What happened last Tuesday is not the fault of the rain. It is true that the amount of water was high and that it was concentrated in a short space of time, but the sky cannot be held responsible for everything that happened. If the island had decent infrastructure, the storm would probably have been suffered as well, but the consequences were aggravated by a chain of absurdities.
On the one hand, that of the weather forecasts themselves. And it is that after a winter that has been plagued with senseless alert declarations, nobody paid too much attention to a yellow alert. When they changed it to orange, the downpour was already over Lanzarote, which had not adopted any measures to deal with it.
On the other hand, we must add a shameful history of lack of investment, poorly executed works and infrastructures, such as the bridges at the entrance to Arrecife, which seem to be designed by the enemy. And all this, despite the fact that the island has experienced moments of economic splendor, in which millions were moved that, according to the facts and some judicial operations, only served to enrich certain businessmen and politicians.
The result of this has been an economic model that has exploded in our faces, skyrocketing unemployment figures, but also a total abandonment of the island in the most basic issues. And it seems that in recent decades, politicians have been up to "other" things.
As if that were not enough, to what happened last Tuesday we must also add the lamentable performance of the current public institutions. Or rather, the non-performance. And not only of the town councils, which tried to cope with the storm as best they could, but also of the Government of the Canary Islands (which, although it seems a cliché, acts very differently when the emergencies are in Tenerife or Gran Canaria), and especially of the highest institution on the island, which was practically missing during the most critical hours.
The emergency services and the operators who tried to restore normality did their job and many citizens have publicly thanked them for their work, despite the fact that they were completely overwhelmed, but the Cabildo as such should have done much more. It should have been at the forefront of the situation from the first moment, creating a crisis cabinet or, at least, promptly informing the citizens. And it didn't.
The first and only press release they sent on Tuesday was well into the afternoon, to report on the work that had been carried out by the Security and Emergency Consortium. But what about before? From the media, and in particular from this house, through Radio Lanzarote and lavozdelanzarote.com, the incidents and problems that were being generated were reported throughout the day, but for this, it was necessary to travel the island, look for information with calls to each town hall and each center that was affected, and also with the invaluable help of listeners and readers who were providing information, images and even videos of what was happening in their respective areas.
On days like Tuesday, the media become more than ever a public service. And the Cabildo did not know or did not want to live up to it. It would be too much to ask the president, Pedro San Ginés, to go out and get muddy and disheveled touring the island. In fact, that morning he wasn't even in Lanzarote. But at least, it was to be expected that he would order his large and expensive press office to issue all the necessary statements, to get them to the citizens, with warnings, recommendations, timely information on the roads that were cut off, suggestions for alternative routes? In short, to demonstrate that the institution was at the forefront of the crisis, and not hidden.
The next day, almost 48 hours after the storm began, the first press release arrived in which San Ginés' name appeared, and the objective was to announce that the president of the Government of the Canary Islands, Paulino Rivero, was going to come to the island to see the damage in person. And the president of the Cabildo was going to sign up for that visit, which was scheduled for the afternoon of this Thursday, of course. However, Rivero's trip had already been announced by the mayor of Arrecife, who was the one who requested it, and who took the lead in asking the Executive for financial aid.
What happened this week, although it is not new, is hair-raising. Suffering the consequences of the rainwater works that have not been completed in Arrecife, due to problems with the contractor, is outrageous, but it is even more worrying to know that failures have already been detected in these works, that those in Playa Honda are stopped because there were "errors" in the project or that even those carried out a few years ago in the capital, have not worked as they should.
To all this we must add the structural failures of public buildings, both old and new, which also did not withstand the storm and ended up flooded. That is to say, that on this island little is done, and what is done is done extremely badly, without any responsibilities ever being purged, beyond the distribution of blame and crossed accusations that arise before a problem like this.
But the worst of all is that although the debate is now opened for a few days, when the sky clears the politicians will be able to forget about the issue again. At least, until the next storm. And let's hope that instead of 54 liters per square meter we don't have to endure more than 200, as happened last year in Tenerife, because then we might have to evacuate the island.
