Salomé Pradas, former Justice and Interior Minister of the Generalitat Valenciana, acknowledged before the judge in Catarroja that she wrote the handwritten instructions behind the Es Alert mobile warning during the devastating floods of 29 October 2024. Judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra’s criminal investigation is examining the emergency response and why the mass warning reached phones at about 20:11, after the disaster had escalated. The floods killed 233 people in Valencia province.
Pradas drafted the document during a crisis meeting of Cecopi, the Integrated Operational Coordination Centre responsible for coordinating the regional and state response. The centre reportedly was not constituted until about 17:00. Information from the investigation, her notes specified which areas should receive the Es Alert and called for deployment of the Military Emergency Unit (UME). The alert reached mobile phones at 20:11. By then, according to the account in the case, most of those reported missing had already died.
Jorge Suárez, then deputy director-general of Emergencies, testified that he took the handwritten instructions from the Cecopi meeting at 19:45 to arrange distribution of the alert. He also told the judge that work on a draft began around 19:06, and revisions to its wording contributed to the delay before transmission. One proposed instruction, “remain in your homes,” was replaced with “suspend travel” amid concerns about its legal basis and whether it was too imperative. Suárez said Pradas questioned the wording and that the changes followed her instructions: “All the changes were made on Pradas’s orders.”
Emergency calls to the 112 hotline began coming in at 16:50, including reports that the Barranco del Poyo had overflowed and was flooding towns such as Paiporta and Catarroja. The disaster killed 55 people in Paiporta and 25 in Catarroja. Picanya Mayor Josep Almenar testified that local officials were already warning people not to go down into garages when the regional alert arrived. His account shows the gap between local warnings and the region-wide mobile notification.
Pradas appeared in court with her lawyer, Eduardo de Urbano, a former magistrate of the Madrid Provincial Court. After she confirmed she had authored the document, her defense asked the judge to cancel a previously ordered handwriting analysis. People close to Pradas have argued that the notes, including the Es Alert texts and the request for UME deployment across the province, had been finalized and authorized by Cecopi by 19:45.
The dispute over the handwritten instructions is linked to a separate question: who had authority to convene Cecopi and approve the alert? Emilio Argüeso, Pradas’s former secretary of state for Emergencies and one of the two defendants in the case, argues in his appeal that he lacked the legal and technical authority to draft, authorize or send messages through Es Alert. His defense says the decision belonged personally to the “single command,” identified as Pradas. The allocation of responsibility remains under investigation and is not a final court finding.
The case examines the roles of the Generalitat’s leadership and the officials involved in preparing and distributing the warning. Spain’s Es Alert system was put in place in 2022 to deliver rapid public warnings to mobile phones. A later response to the 2025 DANA Adam reportedly included repeated alerts and mobility restrictions in 142 municipalities, while the regional president took part in Cecopi from the outset. That comparison has informed discussion of emergency planning but does not determine liability in the 2024 case.
