New contradictions appear in the story of the Generalitat Valenciana on the political management of the DANAthe day of the tragedy. This Tuesday, October 29, the government delegate, Pilar Bernabé, He called the counselor up to three times responsible for the emergency area, Salomé Pradas, to offer you means, without receiving any request.
This was reported on Wednesday by ‘Cadena SER’, information against which the minister defended herself in an interview with ‘In Punt‘, Or He denied that the delegate had proposed the deployment of the Military Emergency Unit. (UME) “at a specific time”. However, a audio captured by ‘TVE’ The very day of the disaster, he denies it: we hear Pradas tell your team about this offer.
On the very day of the disaster, the public channel captured at 12:45 p.m. the moment where Pradas told his colleagues: “For example, the UME, which made itself available to travel there“. A recording that clashes head-on with Pradas’ statements this Thursday in ‘À Punt’.
“She [la delegada, Pilar Bernabé] The only thing he told me at noon was that he had just had a meeting with his team,” said the Minister of Justice and the Interior. “He didn’t give me any information alarming at that time, I deny that at that time she proposed the deployment of EMU at a specific time,” he insisted.
Lack of awareness of alerts
This is not the only revelation that in recent hours questions about the management of Pradas have multiplied, since in this same interview on Valencian television he admitted that until the day of the tragedy I didn’t know the alert system existed massive communications to the population via their cell phones.
The advisor recounted the call she had at 8 p.m. on the day of the incident with the Secretary of State for the Ecological Transition. “That’s when A technician informs us that there is a mechanism called ES-Alertwhich is not regulated for the moment, which is not in our regional plans, which is still a project which is being approved by the national civil protection committee”, he explained. This system, in any case, was already operational in the Valencian Community, as shown in a. press releasepublished a little over a year ago by the Generalitat itself.
Subsequently, and faced with the turmoil caused by the regional emergency manager’s lack of awareness of certain alerts which They were not activated until after 8:00 p.m.the counselor then tried to deny that she did not know him. “Of course I knew the system. massive sending of alert messages to the population in the event of an emergency, a system which was activated by Cecopi once the Ministry of Ecological Transition recognized, on October 29 at 8 p.m., the imminent risk of the dam breaking de Forata,” he said in a tweet.
This emergency meeting, precisely, is at the center of attention not only because of the late hour at which the alert was sent to the population, when the situation was already critical and there were flooded villages, but also because the president of the Generalitat, Carlos Mazón joined two hours laterbefore it starts.
The regional leader assures that he was in a situation “working lunch” and that “he was personally in constant contact with everything that was happening” – despite this, he did not abandon this meal to deal with the emergency – but the information from ‘elDiario.es’ indicates that was not found and that Minister Pradas, present at the meeting since its start at 5 p.m., attempted to contact him several times, without success.
