Military and Athlete: The Hero of the Flood Who Spoke with the King

When the water began to block roads and isolate people, Corporal Óscar Chulvi Máñez was trying to reach his military unit, which had summoned him to address the emergency. He was in his uniform in an "official vehicle," which became immobilised, like many others, near a bridge in the Loriguilla industrial area, where the Rambla del Poyo floodwaters were raging.

"I was heading to Utiel, where we had been activated, and I got stuck, like most people, on that stretch of the highway," Chulvi recounted to the camera of one of his colleagues in the Military Emergency Unit (UME). By chance and with surprise, Chulvi recalled, "we found them." Fortune also had it that an electrical team with a crane was present at the site.

With experience from his time in the Search and Rescue Service (SAR) and trained in the Air and Space Force, Chulvi planned how to transfer these two people. Although "he had no equipment, only his uniform," another soldier assured, he put on a harness from the technicians' gear, grabbed two more, and hooked himself to the end of the steel cable. Using the operator's walkie-talkies, he coordinated the machine's movements. "The only way to access through the torrent was via a crane that was there at the time," Chulvi reminisced. "I proceeded to lower myself with the help of the crane operator to that area. I had a harness tied to the crane's head and put another on each person I extracted. That's how I got them out of the area."

This understated summary, as if it were an everyday occurrence, was repeated to the King on Tuesday during his second visit to Valencia since the DANA caused death and devastation. Interested in the impromptu rescue of those two lives, which most likely would have had a tragic end, King Felipe VI listened to the story, upon the recommendation of the Minister of Defence, and then commented: "Sometimes (the soldiers) keep their reserve, because they do not want to have specific prominence. But it is a case, among many that there may be, of knowing how to react at a given moment, in an unforeseen manner on the fly. With flexibility, with confidence in your abilities, with a clear will to attend to someone who is in a situation of risk and need."

Born in Spain in 1985, Óscar Chulvi Máñez is an avid athlete who has participated in official cycling and cyclocross competitions, duathlons and triathlons, and even beach volleyball. Although not a champion, a few years ago he reached the finish lines with good records. Distinguished in the UME of Valencia, whose third battalion was the first to be activated to help in this tragedy, he has training in rescue, support for rural media, and forest fires.

He participated in assisting victims of another DANA, which occurred in 2019 in Orihuela, where the worst of those floods took place, in addition to "numerous drills with Civil Protection and other units, and several activations," Chulvi maintains. In the operation that night of the DANA, he was in the air for approximately a minute and a half for each person. He held his rescued individuals aloft until they reached the bridge, where he was received with applause. Despite his sudden fame, he does not give interviews. "He is very busy with his work," they justify in the UME. In Military Police duties within the UME's radius, he supports his colleagues in search for missing persons, water pumping, mud cleaning, and vehicle removal. There is no return date. The mission continues.

On the night of the disaster in Catarroja, Miquel heard banging coming from below his flat. The courtyard was already flooded. There were three metres of water. He leaned out the window. It was dark, he recalls. He understood that in the hair salon below, people were drowning. With a hammer in hand, he lowered himself down the facade and began to hammer the wall to create an opening. Like in Chulvi's case, his action was recorded. He spent two hours chiselling the brick. When he managed to open the hole, the rescued were floating with their heads pressed against the ceiling.

Another viral rescue video occurred in Paiporta, where a teacher named Daniel broke the glass of a door leading to the courtyard with the leg of a table he had torn off. He then made the last stretch of a human chain with children in his arms. The water was already up to their chests, covering the little ones.

A third rescue was carried out by Madrid firefighters from the Special Height Rescue Group, deployed to Utiel, who in a helicopter located a woman on the ledge of the second floor of her house with a dog in a box and two cats in her arms, surrounded by water. The firefighter descended on a rope, submerged in the liquid mud, fought against the current, held and secured the woman, who would not let go of her animals despite swallowing water, and lifted her to the aircraft. There are more heroic stories, like Corporal Chulvi's, lost in the mud and unrecorded.