Judge keeps flood victim status for woman who lacked oxygen for 30 hours

The ruling

The instructing judge in Catarroja, Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, issued an order on Friday, 6 November 2026 that keeps a woman in the status of a death victim in the probe into the handling of the October 2024 floods in Valencia. The woman had already been recognised as a victim and included in the investigation through an order of 10 March 2025, the same order that made former regional councillor Salomé Pradas and former regional emergencies secretary Emilio Argüeso formally investigated. The Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunitat Valenciana released the resolution on Friday. The order can be challenged through an appeal for reconsideration and/or an appeal.

A forensic finding that does not establish a link

The Legal Medicine Institute (IML) concluded that there was no causal relationship between the woman's death at hospital on 12 November 2024 and what happened to her after 29 October 2024. She had suffered a serious blood disorder since May 2024, which the report describes as a prior condition. The judge accepted that the report identifies no problem with the oxygen therapy she lacked, but she stressed that the interruption is a fact her relatives have fully established. She went further and placed it among the factors that may have contributed to the death.

“The lack of oxygen supply for nearly 30 hours is fully established by her relatives and must at least be considered a contributing cause of death.”

The judge also pointed to the woman's very delicate state of health, which in her view turned an episode like the flood, with 30 hours without oxygen, into one of the causes behind the death. She added that the lack of planning for measures to take undoubtedly affected people with extremely serious conditions. On that basis she kept the causal link open so that the death is examined within the procedure.

The family's account

According to the daughter's account, which the judge recorded, the oxygen machine had to stay connected to mains power at all times. When the power went out, the family tried to reconnect it but it did not work, and nobody could explain how to set it up. Medical staff did not go to the house on the afternoon of 29 October, because the sister had warned them that water was already rising. An ambulance transfer to the hospital for a test, planned for 30 October, did not take place. The UME rescued the woman at 23:00 on 30 October and took her to La Fe hospital in Valencia, where she died on 12 November 2024.

A separate challenge from the defence

The defence of Emilio Argüeso, represented by the lawyer José María Bueno Manzanares, has appealed against an order of 30 October that added a 73-year-old man as flood victim number 234. The judge justified the inclusion by a foot wound the man suffered when his home in Paiporta was flooded, which could have been the entry point of the infection that killed him in hospital on 18 November 2024. The defence says the Legal Medicine Institute "categorically rules out" a direct causal link and attributes the death to a "severe deficiency in healthcare". It argues he was attended only by telephone at the Paiporta health centre two weeks after the flood and that the diagnosis was deficient. The appeal concludes that the infection grew from his chronic conditions rather than from the flood, and the 6 November decision on the woman remains open to challenge.