“In Puglia it is an emergency within an emergency!”. The alarm was raised by Giuseppe Santoro, Regional Secretary of UIL PA Fire Brigade Puglia, who denounced the Administration’s wicked choice to remove a further 1200 Fire Brigades from the emergency technical rescue system, in the period of greatest commitment due to the plague of fires forests, all to make them participate in a training course.
“Every year it’s always the same story! We saw it last year. While all of Italy was burning, the Fire Brigade switchboards were in haywire and it was not possible to answer all the emergency calls due to the thousands of units being understaffed, the ingenious solution of the leaders was the most absurd, the most unthinkable of all! Subtract further indispensable human resources, to make them participate in a training course, the one for the much desired qualification step. This year too the situation is the same: delays, inefficiencies and inability to plan correctly will lead to the subtraction of another 1,200 units from the already precarious rescue teams who will be involved in the same training course from 24 June. A special commission worked for a good six months to evaluate the titles, a time which in the digital age seems like an absurd eternity”, comments Santoro who also expresses his concern from the aspect of the health of the Fire Brigade.
“A situation of this kind jeopardizes our health, already forced to intervene in extreme conditions, we find ourselves having to spread the enormous workloads over an increasingly smaller number of people, with devastating effects on our organism”. That of the Team Leader is the most delicate qualification of the National Corps, these figures are responsible for coordinating their own rescue team, they are responsible for the success of the interventions and the tasks relating to health and safety at work and prevention obligations fires and judicial police.
“A course that should last months is condensed into just a few weeks, such a barrage of knowledge in such a short time that in the end what remains is just a lot of confusion” claims the trade unionist who adds further “it almost seems like cynical blackmail! Either the training course is reduced and consequently the ability to operate safely or the elderly staff forced thousands of kilometers from home, without a roof over their heads, with increasingly expensive rents and left to fend for themselves are not moved!” So why not schedule the training course in the first months of the year, limiting damage in the “quieter” periods and having staff adequately trained for their function available before the summer, a period in which interventions quadruple and the staff rightly demands planning weekdays as per the contract!? But in the end our continuous proposals are supported by the administration which is increasingly distant from the needs of the operational staff and the ones who will pay the consequences will always be the Fire Brigade and the citizens who will have nothing but to rely on a miracle from Santa Barbara”, He concludes.
