LECCE – Declare a state of emergency due to “the obvious imbalance between the needs of the rescue system and the available resources, such as to make it impossible to guarantee the safety of the citizens of Puglia and tourists who visit our region”. Again: “An immediate decisive intervention that includes the assignment, even temporary, to Puglia of men and means in quantities adequate to the emergency situation in progress”. And then: “The opening of an investigation that identifies the responsibilities that certainly exist with respect to the disastrous management of all phases of a summer fire campaign, in the phases of prevention, contrast and repression”.
The regional firefighters’ unions do not mince their words and have written to the highest levels of the national Corps and to the president of the Puglia Region, Michele Emiliano, making a gloomy prediction: 2024, according to them, could be the worst year ever for the management of fires in the territory. In any case, Fns Cisl, Conapo, Uil Pa, Vvf Fp Cgil, Confsal Vvf and Usb Pu accuse that 2024 “has already become the worst year compared to what the competent state and regional administrations should have done to avoid incalculable damage and have not done”. And just think of what is happening in these hours, with natural areas of Salento hit by various fires in the face of available resources deemed “totally inadequate”.
But there’s more. “The Puglia Region – write the joint acronyms – is exhibiting an incomprehensible oppositional attitude towards the firefighters and the clear inability to provide for the Aib tasks that should be its own. The Aib convention – they underline – was signed only immediately before 15 June, the start date of the theoretical period of maximum danger, making it impossible to activate the extraordinary resources that fight forest fires and limit the damage in time”. And they highlight the fact that “the Fire Department has not yet returned the countersigned document. Result: nothing was done to really combat forest fires. If we weren’t living it, we wouldn’t believe it.”
To name just one, the supplementary forestry team formed just to fight brush fires has not yet left. And it seems that the start has always been on June 15 of each year, with additional resources sent later. The reasons for the various delays that are accumulating are not known and the unions are asking the Puglia Region and the Fire Department to publicly explain the reasons.
Fns Cisl, Conapo, Uil Pa, Vvf Fp Cgil, Confsal Vvf and Usb Pu do not mince their words, and in their document they add: “The Region is facing a problem of enormous seriousness with a device that it is generous to define as improbable, while the Fire Department is not even able to make the experiences of past years useful, re-proposing an unsuitable device, both in terms of available resources and operational strategies. For example, last year the total inadequacy of the system for sending AIB operational sections from all over Italy was a shining example of operational failure that would seem to have gone unnoticed by those who should have taken action and instead remained asleep”.
In short, new ones would have been added to the old problems and according to the unions we are faced with prevention measures that are totally absent, with fire prevention regressing in effectiveness and efficiency and poor repression, considering the results not achieved. So I’m waiting for explanations and immediate remedial action. Otherwise, “fighting actions that will involve civil society in all its legitimate expressions” are announced.
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