This Thursday the campaign to prevent and fight forest fires in Castilla-La Mancha was presented, coinciding with the imminent arrival of summer. The Board is going to allocate 95.2 million euros to it: 40 for extinction and 55.2 for prevention. As always, the work of the nearly 3,000 professionals will be fundamental, including technicians and environmental agents from the Ministry of Sustainable Development, forest firefighters and staff from the public company Geacam, who will have 249 means at their disposal (220 by land and 29 by air) .
Among the novelties, the Minister José Luis Escudero highlighted the advance in the deployment of aerial resources during the month of May and the improvement of working conditions, with more comfortable and safer work centers.
In this sense, 1.5 million has been invested in adapting the bases of Lagunas de Ruidera, Viso del Marqués or Casas de Ves. Investment in heavy machinery has also increased by 37 percent, “a very important tool due to the type of land, as well as its effectiveness for the control and extinction of fires in coordination with the rest of the means.”
The professionals will have 20 operational pumpers and some teams have been strengthened, such as those of the two Superpuma helicopters, to which one more technical manager is incorporated in each of them. As for the staff, there will be five managers of infrastructure maintenance and four drone pilots to handle this image capture technology in day or night actions, “which monitor the emergency in a faster and safer way, especially in inaccessible areas” . Likewise, 21 engineering technicians are incorporated in management and coordination tasks.
As for the means, among the 29 aerial ones, a support helicopter for the coordination of extinction and command, two Superpuma helicopters and four amphibious planes stand out. And among the 220 terrestrial there are 13 helicopter brigades, 51 brigades, 48 fire trucks, 37 fire trucks, five nurses, 45 mobile patrols, two communications units, two reinforcement patrols and 17 heavy machinery teams.
Antena 3 journalist Roberto Brasero, a native of Talavera de la Reina, is the star of the communication campaign
