First Corporal Fernando Martín Pozueco brought several residents of his urbanization in Villamanta to safety in the early morning of the 4th, during the floods caused by the DANA that affected the town. “It was like in the movies: there was no light and when lightning struck and everything lit up, all I saw was the ocean.”
This soldier from the Electronic Warfare Regiment number 31 of the Army held a meeting this Monday with the acting Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, who described his performance as “heroic.”
The corporal has said that he was at home, accompanied by his mother and daughter when, upon observing the intensity of the rain, he decided to put them both safe on the second floor of the house and tear out the drains in the patio.
He raised the alarm to his neighbors and, when the water reached his waist, he decided to return home and park his car in a dry area that had not yet been flooded.
Back in his chalet, the soldier watched through the window as a wave swept away all the vehicles, including his, and decided to return to the street to help his neighbors, who were shouting for help.
Without electricity, because the wave had uprooted the urbanization’s electrical poles, and overcoming the resistance of the strong current of water that was dragging him along, he jumped the fences of each chalet and checked, one by one, how its inhabitants were.
“Stones, fences were falling on me, dead animals, rabbits, and something that I don’t know if it was a sheep or a dog hit me on the head,” he commented.
At first I was alone; then he began to see the lights of the emergency services, but they did not reach where he was. “I thought, either the water goes so they can go down or I’ll go up and take them down.” And that’s what he did.
On his way through the urbanization, he decided to climb an embankment up to three times, to reach a fence and allow three firefighters to enter.
They formed a human chain and managed to cross the main street of the development, where the current ran, to try to reach the chalets in the background, which were in danger due to their proximity to the river.
Among the neighbors he managed to save is an elderly woman, whose husband was not as lucky. She clung to a window fence but the current carried him away.
“It made me very angry not being able to save my neighbor. I appreciated him and it’s very hard because I heard them scream. I tried again and again, you try to reach and you can’t, one of the times the current dragged me, I got hooked on a stand, the rope broke and I tied my arm, otherwise I would also be floating there,” he explained.
He worked tirelessly for hours, all morning and until noon, without wasting a second, returning repeatedly to the homes to check on his neighbors and take a head count.
“It’s not just what you step on, you receive a lot of blows, a lot of cuts, from the waist down I’m all purple, but in those moments you’re hearing screams and you don’t pay attention to the pain. I was only thinking about reaching people,” he says.
The meeting with the minister was also attended by Corporal Pedro Peña del Pino, from the Military Emergency Unit (UME), who, together with his dog, located the body of one of the women who disappeared in the Community of Madrid during the DANA.
“You represent the best of the Armed Forces and also of human beings in such difficult times,” said Margarita Robles.
