The Kristin depression not only took lives, roofs, trees and high voltage poles, but also exposed the flaws of a State that was once again not up to the task at a critical moment. When he went to the field, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa wanted to send the message that, this time, it would not be a lack of prevention. Allow me to disagree, Mr. President: that is precisely what happened. We have failed, time and time again, due to a lack of prevention in public policies, due to a lack of responsible choices over the years, capable of preparing the country for phenomena that can no longer be treated as unexpected.
Prevention is not limited to weather alerts warning that a storm is coming. It is to ensure that infrastructures are not out of adjustment to increasingly extreme climatic phenomena, as the President of the Republic (rightly) pointed out. It means investing in redundancy in mobile communications, generators, more resilient electrical networks, strengthening technical and human resources. Does all this involve a lot of money? Yes. But above all it involves making the right political choices, so as not to perpetuate the incompetence and lack of preparation that erode citizens’ trust in State institutions.
Over the decades, Portugal abandoned sustained public investment, infrastructure maintenance and strengthening the State’s response capacity. The result is clear: we are vulnerable to the “bad luck” that inevitably happens, despite repeated scientific warnings that, in practice, we continue to ignore. A stance close to the irresponsibility of the populists and denialists we criticize (who are then quick to explore the consequences of phenomena that pretend not to exist).
So we failed again, yes. But this structural incapacity of the country was also accompanied by serious flaws in the concrete response to this crisis. There was no effective warning and preparedness system. It took a while to realize the true extent of the damage, in a country that, administratively, continues to not see beyond its centralist navel. The response was disjointed, without a corresponding national mobilization, left to the initiative of each municipality and civil society itself, which, aware of the State’s indecorum, unfolds support and volunteering initiatives.
We had ministers more concerned with personal promotion videos, vanity parades in front of the cameras, others inexplicably missing in action and institutional communication as reliable as that of SIRESP which, surprisingly, once again experienced failures. The state of calamity had to wait for the Council of Ministers the following day, the National Civil Protection Commission only met this Sunday (five days later), and thousands of people remain without electricity, water or communications.
The Kristin depression left a trail of material destruction that will take a long time to repair and an even more difficult task ahead: repairing citizens’ trust in state institutions.
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