The chronology of the events of the dana of October 29 of last year reveals the slowness with which the Generalitat Valenciana was adopting various measures that day, both in terms of warning the population and in the mobilization of rescue personnel.
That day, the Valencian Government was late for everything, despite the fact that at 7:36 a.m. the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) activated the first red notice which implies that “the danger is extraordinary for people and property” and that in the bulletin that the agency sent to the Generalitat's Emergencies it warned that “the accumulation (of 180 liters per square meter in 12 hours) can occur in two or three hours.”
At 10:00 a.m. in the morning, practically the entire province of Valencia was on red notice and at 12:30 p.m. Emergencies had already activated two hydrological alerts due to the warnings received from the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ) due to the flooding of the Magro River and the Poyo ravine. In fact, at that same time, the former Minister of Justice and sole command of the emergency, Salomé Pradas, noted in a piece of paper both situations as the two most important to take into account due to the risk they entailed, as can be seen in the videos from the L'Eliana Emergency Center that have recently come to light.
Despite this whole situation and the serious flooding that was already occurring in Utiel, the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi) did not convene until 3:00 p.m. (to meet two hours later), at which time the first mobilization of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) for this area was requested, after having rejected a first offer from the Government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, at 12:23 p.m. The email from the Emergency Room of the Generalitat requesting the means to Utiel went out at 3:40 p.m. As the head of the Consell, Carlos Mazón, has recognized in an interview in The Provincesdespite being aware of this situation, including the mobilization of the UME, decided to go eat at Ventorro.
Furthermore, according to the documentation collected by elDiario.es, despite the severity of the effects of the flood as the minutes passed, it was not until 8:30 p.m. when the deputy director general of Emergencies, Jorge Suárez, signed the second document requesting that the mobilization of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) be expanded to the entire province of Valencia. The email from the Emergency Room of the Generalitat with the request goes out at 8:35 p.m., seven minutes after Mazón's arrival at Cecopi. The president also stated in the aforementioned interview that “he never gave an order to Pradas, neither to convene the Cecopi nor to activate the EMU, nor to send the alert.”
The truth is that the videos that have recently been published with the arrival of the head of the Consell at the Emergency Coordination Center (CCE) at 8:28 p.m. show a completely overwhelmed Mazón to which the technicians, Pradas and the president of the Provincial Council of Valencia try to give explanations, presumably telling him the last hour of the situation: “It was a meteorology never known. An explosion,” the then Minister of Justice explains graphically, Salomé Pradas, before Mazón joins the meeting with the rest of the administrations and State Security Forces and Bodies.
At that time, six Valencian regions were already suffering historic flooding and the rescue teams were helpless in the face of the flood that had already claimed dozens of lives.
These videos owned by Emergencies, recorded by an external company, have been hidden from the head of the Court of Instruction number 3 of Catarroja, Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, for 11 months, until elDiario.es exclusively revealed that the Generalitat had its own recording of the key moments of the Cecopi. These documents are so important to the cause that one of them shows that Emergencies put on the table the possibility of launching a first ES-Alert around 5:10 p.m., three hours before the one at 8:11 p.m. was sent. A fact that shows the delay and lack of reaction from the Generalitat.
According to the same documentation collected by this editorial team, the Generalitat requested on March 27 at 3:00 p.m. the demobilization of the troops.
The UME rescued more than 570 people in the first hours
According to various sources consulted by elDiario.es, the UME mobilized a total of 2,200 troops, 1,200 of them in the first eight hours of the catastrophe. In addition, they used 600 means and managed to rescue more than 570 people in those first hours. The Command managed to coordinate 33,000 members of the Armed Forces with up to 8,600 soldiers working simultaneously in a day.
The UME thus carried out its largest deployment in an emergency that affected 75 municipalities. The high number of personnel, assets and infrastructure affected generated a need for a rapid response to reduce the damage caused.