The autonomous Executive of Carlos Mazón took just four months to get rid of the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE), an organization inherited from the previous Government of the Pacte del Botànic and in charge of guaranteeing rapid intervention anywhere in the territory in case of emergencies of origin. meteorological or seismic, extinguishing forest fires and tsunamis.
It was a body – a kind of autonomous version of the Military Emergency Unit (UME) – designed to guarantee rapid intervention in any emergency and created by the previous Consell of the socialist Ximo Puig in February 2023. However, the Government de Mazón, then formed by the PP and Vox, urgently repealed the decree that regulated the creation of the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE).
It was the “first Ximo Puig organization suppressed by Carlos Mazón,” according to what the Valencian PP stated in a tweet that numerous users of the social network X recovered this Tuesday, after the DANA flood disaster.
The questioned action of the regional government in the face of the floods suffered this Tuesday in dozens of Valencian towns, especially in the regions of Utiel-Requena, La Ribera and l’Horta Sud, has revived criticism of Mazón for his decision to eliminate the UVE in his embryonic phase.
When announcing its elimination, in November 2023, the then Minister of Justice, Elisa Núñez, called the UVE an “occurrence.” For her part, the spokesperson for the Consell, Ruth Merino, framed the decision in Carlos Mazón’s project to “optimize all the organizations and entities of the public sector so that management is efficient.”
The unit depended, in the initial design of the Executive of the PSPV-PSOE, Compromís and Unides Podem, on the Valencian Agency for Security and Emergency Response. Mazón, for his part, called the UVE a “chiringuito” that pitted “fire departments against each other” and that did not give them equipment.
“The UVE is a project that adds more complexity to the management of emergencies in the Valencian Community, a new idea to cover enormous deficiencies in that management and that punished a sector fed up with bad decisions,” said the then head of the Department of Justice and Interior, Elisa Núñez, when the Consell de Mazón eliminated the entity.
The UVE delved “into the disaster,” according to Vox
Núñez maintained that the management of emergencies in the Valencian Community was not resolved by “creating this Unit, but by redefining the prevention, extinction and rescue model,” improving coordination and laying “the foundations for a better future.”
“The UVE,” criticized the then Vox councilor, “was created without the necessary assistance and reflection on a structural issue and an essential public service like this one and, therefore, it did not help to redefine that model, but rather to make it worse and complicate it.” even more and it only meant delving into lack of coordination and disaster.”
The spokesperson for the Consell and Minister of Finance, Economy and Public Administration, Ruth Merino, alleged that “there are more appropriate formulas to guarantee the coordination of emergencies.”
Mazón defends the decision to eliminate the UVE
The Generalitat has assured this Wednesday that the UVE “was just another fictitious organization with zero more firefighters, zero more material resources and zero efficiency” and has defended that in “no case did it improve or expand any emergency services.” “I only created positions to pay salaries to casually placed people,” he maintained.
Sources from the Presidency of the Generalitat cited by Europa Press have come forward after criticism from PSOE deputies to ‘president’ Carlos Mazón, whom they have blamed for suppressing this unity upon coming to power, coinciding with the DANA that affects these days to the Valencian Community.
These sources have specified that the coordination of powers “is already assumed by 112”, so they cannot “invade state powers or create an army”, because for that “we have the UME at the state level”. Thus, they maintain that the SVU “only created middle managers, it did not put firefighters on the road” and they emphasize that this unit “never existed, it was never anything.” “It was a decree with no support behind it. It didn’t even have offices. “It was a ghost agency,” they add.
Faced with this situation, they have claimed that the current Consell led by Carlos Mazón “has reinforced the forest fire service, has acquired a commitment to reinforce and modernize its material resources and has reinforced collaboration with the firefighters of the provincial councils and the Forces and Corps. of State Security”.
Furthermore, they have stressed that the platform of Firefighters of the Valencian Community, in which “all unions are represented”, expressed “their rejection of the project” and justified it by saying that, in their opinion, the UVE represented “a increase in unnecessary spending, since the functions they want to give to it are already carried out by the firefighters of the provincial consortiums and the city councils of the capitals.” They also denounced that it would mean “an increase in lack of coordination between services due to the duplication created without any technical or operational need.”
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