The first reaction of a self-respecting opposition party in the face of an emergency, be it a downpour, fire, snowfall, blackout or any major weather mishap, is to criticize the government. It is manual. Many politicians have left their careers in the gutter due to mismanagement of these unexpected claims and others, on the contrary, have won the favor of the electorate by acting quickly in the face of the conflict. For this reason, especially in these times of social networks where failures are discovered immediately and it is very easy for them to be magnified, the public authorities act with great caution. All that remains is to review the role of the media, which often becomes implacable judges against the Administration, but, yes, always in the past. How easy it is to diagnose errors once they have already been committed.
For all these reasons, it is easy to deduce that, given the data that the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) put on the table on Sunday, the response of the different public institutions was to take care of themselves and issue a general warning that, for a On the one hand, it warned the public of the real risks that the cold drop entailed and, on the other, it left a public record that the incident had not caught them off guard. For those who consider that the alert was exaggerated, it is enough to remember that there have been five deaths in the last 72 hours apart from all the damage caused.
In Spain we are not used to this, but, as Delia Rodríguez explains well in the Opinion pages, many of our contemporaries in other parts of the globe coexist without problems with continuous warnings about earthquakes, hurricanes or floods. And it is already known that some of those who showed their indignation at having been bothered by an alert on their mobile could perfectly be the same ones who reacted the next day criticizing the Government for its improvisation. You know what they say in Italy: “Piove, porco governo”. Well that, in this case, the public performance has been successful. Better to warn than to cure.
