The head of the Military Emergency Unit (UME), Lieutenant General Javier Marcos, justified this Friday the response that all the emergency services gave to the disaster caused by DANA and, in particular, the actions of Armed Forces.
“No one could have predicted the scale of what happened,” he said during an appearance at the Defense Ministry after the daily meeting of the crisis committee tasked with monitoring the tragedy. This is his second public appearance since the floods, the first last Monday at the Palace of Moncloa.
Faced with criticism over the scale of the response to the scale of the tragedy, the general recalled some comments from an affected neighbor whom he admitted to having asked himself if he thought something was wrong . “He started crying and told me that no one was late,” he admitted, highlighting the amount of water that devastated several towns in a few minutes.
The head of the EMU, the top army responsible for the deployment, insisted they intervene “as soon as possible”. “From the EMU point of view, what came to me did not fail. “Everything possible was reported in a timely manner,” he insisted, also emphasizing several times that the relationship between the Valencian Community and the Ministry of the Interior “was correct.”
The Armed Forces are responsible for an area of 4,608 square kilometers, or 43% of the area of the province of Valencia. So far, he said “a lot of progress has been made and a lot of work has been done,” although “there is still a lot of work to be done.”
A total of 8,478 UME and army personnel are deployed and four towns are still marked as red zones of maximum need: Paiporta, Catarroja, Masanasa and Chiva. “This is not a military operation, it is an emergency operation with military forces,” he said.
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