“We acted when the Valencian government gave us the green light”

UME Chief General Javier Marcos, commander of the military deployment in response to the DANA emergency in Valencia, defended the speed of action of his soldiers. “The day the emergency broke out, the EMU issued alert and forward deployment. When the authorization came, it took my soldiers 15 minutes to arrive. We were one of the few to be at Utiel-Requena,” he noted.

During a press conference from the Palacio de la Moncloa with the Secretary General of Land Transport, Marta Serrano, the General President of the UME stressed that the UME was “prepared, alerted and ready to intervene as soon as we have the green light from the Valencian municipality”. Community”. This is how he explains that he himself alerted a thousand soldiers so that they would be available as soon as the UME obtained the green light.

Marcos stressed during his appearance that the autonomous communities must call them.

“It is true that we did not intervene quickly,” he admitted, before emphasizing that the weather prevented this immediate action and that order and discipline are important. “We cannot add chaos to a chaotic situation,” he warned.

The general head of the EMU asked for “patience” in the face of this chaotic situation with a “terrible destruction of infrastructure” which complicates the work of the 7,800 soldiers on the ground. “We have been and continue to be” in each affected commune, assured the soldier, while guaranteeing that the Armed Forces do not leave “a house behind them” and “that they leave their skin behind them at every moment” .

The general head of the EMU, who personally visited the affected areas in recent days, stressed that “the degree of destruction is such that mobility is limited.” “It’s such a complexity that it requires two things: discipline and patience,” he added.

In this sense, after recognizing that “it is difficult because emotion and pain make it not easy”, he asked the population to “understand that the 7,800 soldiers of the Armed Forces are doing everything they can », by doubling the teams, and that there are more personnel available to be able to transport it on the planes.

According to General Marcos, troops from the EMU, Army, Navy and Air Force are present in the 69 affected villages, but “it’s not just the villages, it’s the The roads that connect these villages are the bridges. , these are the isolated houses.”

“We do not leave a home behind us,” he assured, affirming that the soldiers “give their all at all times”, with periods of duty of twelve hours, after which they return exhausted. “You cannot question behavior of the armed forces which is not what it should be,” he insisted, defending that they do it “of course, in fulfilling our mission, which is to save to serve.

Finally, he explained that the UME has a morgue with a capacity of 400 corpses, after emphasizing that the one initially planned had a capacity of 100 corpses but that we quickly saw that it would be small.

“These deceased people need decent space, decent care, and that is what we are doing with the help of the Valencian authorities,” he concluded.