<\/p>\n
Grieving relatives will join political leaders Wednesday for a state memorial service in Spain for the more than 230 victims of last year\u2019s floods on the anniversary of the disaster.<\/p>\n
King Felipe VI will lead mourners at the ceremony, which is set to get underway at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT) in Valencia, Spain\u2019s third-largest city on the Mediterranean coast.<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and regional leader Carlos Mazon \u2014 who is under fire over his response to Spain\u2019s deadliest floods in a generation \u2014 are also expected to attend.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Mayors from the 78 municipalities hit by the floods, mostly in the southern outskirts of Valencia, have been invited, along with around 800 relatives of the victims.<\/p>\n
The event will take place at a museum in the City of Arts and Sciences, a cultural and architectural complex surrounded by shallow pools in Valencia.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday is an incredibly difficult day for the families of the victims,\u201d Sanchez said in parliament on Wednesday shortly after lawmakers observed a minute of silence in memory of the dead.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is also a profoundly hard day for those who have lost everything and are now working to rebuild their lives after what has occurred.\u201d<\/p>\n
In last year\u2019s natural disaster, torrential rain unleashed flooding that killed 229 people in towns near Valencia.<\/p>\n
Seven more people died in the neighbouring Castilla-La Mancha region, and one person died in Andalusia in the south.<\/p>\n
The deluge swept away 130,000 vehicles and damaged thousands of homes, generating 800,000 tonnes of debris.<\/p>\n
Mazon\u2019s regional administration has been heavily criticised for not sending out alerts to mobile phones until 8:11 pm \u2014 when flooding had already started in some places.<\/p>\n
That was more than 12 hours after the national weather agency had issued its highest alert level for torrential rains.<\/p>\n
Despite signs of severe flooding, Mazon went ahead with an hours-long lunch with a journalist on the day of the catastrophe.<\/p>\n
He has defended his handling of the crisis, saying its magnitude was unforeseeable and that central authorities did not provide sufficient warning about the severity of the rain.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did our best under unimaginable circumstances, yet in many cases it was not enough, and today we must once again acknowledge that reality,\u201d Mazon said in a televised address on Wednesday ahead of the memorial.<\/p>\n
The regional government has declared a day of mourning, while the town of Paiporta, at the epicentre of the disaster, will observe three days of remembrance.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday is going to be a very hard day for everyone because reliving everything is very painful,\u201d Marga Fernandez, a 68-year-old retiree, told AFP as she walked through Paiporta with her husband.<\/p>\n
On one of Paiporta\u2019s main streets, a pharmacy had placed a row of red and white candles on the ground by its entrance to honour the deceased.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think Paiporta will take many years to be like it was, in terms of streets and houses, and I don\u2019t think the wound will ever fully heal,\u201d said Carmen Rausell, a 61-year-old pharmacist, her eyes welling with tears.<\/p>\n
More than 50,000 people took to the streets of Valencia city on Saturday to demand that Mazon resign over his response to the floods, the latest in a string of such demonstrations.<\/p>\n
Mazon has frequently been heckled when appearing at public events, and some victims\u2019 families have called on him to stay away from the state memorial.<\/p>\n
But his conservative Popular Party, which sits in opposition to the Socialist Sanchez at the national level, has insisted he should be present as the representative of the Valencian people.<\/p>\n
Under Spain\u2019s decentralised system, managing disasters falls under the authority of regional governments.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Rephrase in a different way as if you were a native American speaker as a content creation expert and do not talk about yourself or your experience in the text and do not show yourself as an artificial intelligence who wrote and fill the bullet point in the topic and speak the heart of the topic itself and dont take date of blog in ther first and dont take text like box of newsliter subscribe on post from content and romove all linke insert in content and and remove all affiliate disclosure phrases on content like this “This post may contain Amazon or other affiliate links that allow us to earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Please see our Disclosure Policy for more info” and “#” put in its place bullet point, and romove name of the web site or his links we are take a content from our new creation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grieving relatives will join political leaders Wednesday for a state memorial service in Spain for the more than 230 victims of last year\u2019s floods on the anniversary of the disaster. King Felipe VI will lead mourners at the ceremony, which is set to get underway at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT) in Valencia, Spain\u2019s third-largest city […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[940,5293,3092,3096,3097,3073,1182,234,3095,3277,2625,7594,3093,3088,1235,3094,3098],"class_list":["post-11082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-international","tag-american","tag-anniversary","tag-characters","tag-content","tag-creation","tag-deadly","tag-dont","tag-experience","tag-expert","tag-floods","tag-hold","tag-memorial","tag-native","tag-rephrase","tag-spain","tag-speaker","tag-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11084,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11082\/revisions\/11084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alfanouscar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}