The convening union organizations, UGT, CCOO and CSIF, They denounce that the current situation of the body of forest agents of the Community of Madrid is unsustainable and is currently aggravated at the beginning of the 2025 Infoma campaign to fight forest fires.
One more year, The panorama faced by the agents and therefore the Madrid mountains is very worryingthere are no sufficient forest agents to comply with the commitments set in the current agreements and cover the service 24 hours a day.
This situation avocates them in many cases to make forest fire guards already respond to solo emergencies, reaching the case of some forest regions discovered and without agents. The selective processes are eternalized, which means that the amount of personnel is maintainedin addition to an obvious abuse of opponents who mortgage up to four years or more of their life to try to access the body.
How will Madrid face the summer fire season?
Some Two hundred forest agents of the Community of Madrid have concentrated in front of the Ministry of Environment To ask the counselor Carlos Novillo to open a negotiation to stop the lack of troops, the deficiencies of his offices and the current operational management that they consider “chaos.”
This Monday’s protest has been convened by CSIF, CCOO and UGT because Current situation of the body of forest agents of the Community of Madrid is “unsustainable” and is currently aggravated at the beginning of the 2025 Infoma campaign to fight forest fires.
The Summer campaign is “complicated” because there is a lot of herbaceous vegetationwhich causes the fires to extend rapidly at the beginning and it is difficult to suffocate them in the first 15 minutes, especially if there are no agents deployed by the mountain to monitor and avoid those first conatos, according to the head of forest agents of CSIF Madrid, José María Bermúdez.
According to CSIF, the Autonomic Government promised that this year there would be 453 forest agents in the community of Madridbut the reality is that there are 246, a number with which it is “impossible” to cover the service the twenty -four hours of seven days a week and that entails, in practice, “the lack of protection of the Madrid environment,” Bermúdez added.
This forces them, in many cases, to make forest fire guards already respond to emergencies solo “exposing yourself to unasumable risks”reaching the case of staying some forest regions discovered and without agents, the summons say.
After More than eight years of claims, they are still waiting for a plan of new regional officeswith a sufficient budget to correct the deficiencies of a large number of units that are “obsolete and outdated” and do not gather the necessary dimensions, distribution and endowments.
The problem is really serious
Some offices detail the unionsbreach the basic rules of occupational hazards to become a workplace, due to lack of drinking waterthe risk of cancer due to radon exposure -some of them triples the limits set by WHO -, breach of emergency and evacuation plans or the lack of adequate rest areas for forest agents.
For mobilization promoters, administration avoid your responsibilities and impose your criteria through interior notes and instructionswithout negotiation, applying “a biased and restrictive interpretation of the standards” that regulate their day and schedule established in the signed agreements.
«The selective processes in Madrid are eternalized, “which means” a practically null net growth “ And “a mistreatment” to opponents who mortgage years of his life to try to access the body, the unions point out.
They specify that created and implanted a blank technical scalethat today and eight years after its creation remains without defined functions, which leads to a situation of “professional stagnation.” EFE / ECOticias.com