Valencia local water authority denies it ‘deleted data to hide it knew a disaster was imminent’: Torrent in Spain’s worst natural disaster for a century was ‘so powerful it swept sensor away’ 

THE flow of water through the Poyo Ravine at the epicentre of last week’s flooding was so powerful that it overwhelmed the sensor, according to the Hydrographical Confederation of Jucar (CHJ).

The sensor, which recorded the volumes of water cubic metres per second every five minutes, gave its last reading at 6.55pm on October 29, the day of the catastrophic flooding.

The final reading was a massive 2,282 cubic metres a second rushing through the ravine straddled by the town of Paiporta, before the data appeared to simply stop.

This prompted a renewed front in the battle between the central government in Madrid and the Valencian Generalitat, which accused the CHJ of failing to report the deadly increase in the flow until almost 7pm.

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It claimed the local water authority, which is under the Ministry for Ecological Transition, had ‘deleted’ this key information to ‘hide’ that it knew when the ravine had overflowed.

But according to climate scientist Antonio Delgado ‘the sensor system was swept away in the deluge.’

“This morning I consulted with the CHJ about this lack of data at the SAIH, and they explained to me that there is no data available because the system was offline due to the damage,” he wrote on Twitter/X.

“However, if requested, they can provide it without any problem.”

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The CHJ had sent an email to local authorities at 6.43pm stating: “For your information, the flooding is speeding up very fast.”

The Generalitat, under pressure to explain why they waited till 8pm to send the Civil Protection alert to mobile phones in the area, has claimed the CHJ ‘erased the data on the flow of the Poyo ravine so as not to show that it knew that at 6pm this flow was at an enormous level and that there was an extreme and imminent risk of a flood.’

It claims it received no updates from the CHJ between 4.13pm and 6.43pm, when the flow rate had already reached 1,686 cubic metres per second

“The CHJ did not send any further email or any communication warning of the possible ‘dangerous consequences’ of this flow rate,” it added.