At least 95 people died in flash floods in eastern Spain on Tuesday ...

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... the elevated death toll in Valencia also has to be understood in the context of a disastrous emergency management from the right-wing regional government — and companies’ insistence that their employees attend work. “Many of those who have died or have been injured were working at the time,” the country’s largest union, CCOO (Comisiones Obreras), highlighted. “[We] denounce the continuation of work when the risk of flooding was already known.”

Hundreds of employees were trapped overnight Tuesday in an IKEA outlet and the massive Bonaire shopping mall in Valencia, as floodwaters rose to dangerous levels. “The people who have kept us here working, without closing, are our supervisors,” one employee explained in a video posted on social media. “They didn’t let us leave. They have gambled with our lives.”

A further eight hundred workers in an industrial park were trapped in precarious conditions, with many having to climb onto the roofs of warehouses to escape danger. From there, some called their families to say goodbye in what they believed to be their final hours. They were later rescued. In other dramatic footage, a supermarket delivery driver was rescued by a helicopter as his truck was semisubmerged in water — with much of the media blurring the well-known corporate logo of Mercadona in photos so as to avoid reputational damage to the Spanish company. Like many others, it decided to keep its workers in the field even after the country’s national meteorological office issued a red alert for extreme weather that morning.

In this respect, the Valencia floods offer a tragic example of what it means when unscrupulous bosses, vicious neoliberalism, and policies of far-right denialists intersect with a climate-related disaster. As journalist Daniel Bernabé notes, “Putting profit before life is not permissible, but it also explains the principles that govern our society.”

This was a point further underscored by images inside of an outsourced public nursing home that showed elderly people desperately wading through floodwaters, with few if any staff members visible. Six residents died in the home, which is one of twenty-two run by the corrupt construction magnate Enrique Ortiz.

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