On July 11, 2024, the former Valencian Minister of Justice and Interior, Elisa Núñez, of Vox, signed a resolution approving the Preventive Surveillance Program against Forest Fires of the Valencian Community, which will govern for the next few years, with unlimited validity according to the resolution. Establishes the distribution of means, resources and surveillance areas in the fight against forest fires within the framework of prevention. On the same day, July 11, the president of the Generalitat, the popular Carlos Mazón, announced the dismissal of the Vox advisers from his government.
According to the representation of the Valencian Intersindical in the public company Vaersa, the former councilor Núñez “died killing”. They refer to the resolution he signed regarding the prevention of forest fires, eliminating from Annex V, “Distribution of resources”, of the aforementioned Preventive Surveillance Program against Forest Fires, annex 2, “all the forest observatories of the Valencian Community”. In this way, they warn that in the next attributions of the fire prevention plan to Vaersa, or to any other entity, “there would be no obligation to contract the forest observatories”: “This resolution was published ‘with agasticity’ (traitorously?) in the DOGV of August 6, 2024”.
Forest observatories, “which in the popular imagination are watchtowers on mountain tops”, have been operating in the Valencian Community and practically throughout the world “for an indefinite period of time”. Due to their location and the ease of fire detection and communication, “they are usually at the top of the statistics in early fire detection”. The union explains that it is “hard work for those who have no vocation, in solitude, with difficult access, exposed to extreme cold and heat; It is work for people who have spent part of their lives, for some almost their entire professional life, contributing to our work for society.
“Although in the document, in a superficial and oblique manner, forest observatories are sometimes mentioned, in the decisive part of the distribution of resources, they have been eliminated,” they warn.
In this distribution of resources of the program that will govern the resources against forest fires, they affirm, “taking as an example Zone 1 (Rincón de Ademuz), we see that the forest observatories disappear in the basic prevention resources.” Units, agents and surveillance brigades are maintained.
“This pattern is followed in all the demarcations: absolutely all the forest observatories have disappeared from the programming.” Thus, they consider that “an error of this magnitude in the program that will now govern the resources against forest fires is difficult for us to believe; an error of this magnitude on the same day that the Vox advisor was dismissed from his position is even more difficult for us to believe”, which is why they emphasize that there was an intentionality on the part of Vox, “which it seems that the PP assumes by not having corrected it.”
From the Valencian Intersindical, they demand that the PP government, the current councilor Salomé Pradas and the president Carlos Mazón, “clearly define whether they are going to end the forest fire observatories, leaving more than 200 professionals on the street, closing 70 forest observatories and putting our mountains under irrigation. We demand that they speak clearly, that they clarify whether it is the work of Vox or if they share this guideline, and that they act accordingly.”
“There is no reference to forest observatories”
The department currently headed by Salomé Pradas explains that the Preventive Monitoring Program against Forest Fires of the Valencian Community is the resolution that currently serves as the basis for the general orientation. A program that, since the general direction has been assumed by the Ministry of the Environment, Infrastructure and Territory, “has been analyzed to apply it and implement improvements.”
In Annex V “there is no reference to forest observatories because this refers to the distribution of mobile resources.” Despite this, they maintain that, in other sections of the program, such as Annex 4, “there is explicit reference to them and the role they play. The Generalitat is very aware of the work and, in this sense, the regional secretary of the Environment, Raúl Mérida, visited one of these observatories a few days ago to inquire about its work.”
It is expected that after the corresponding analysis already carried out, this program will be expanded in the short term “with a section in which the role of a fundamental tool in the prevention of forest fires such as observatories will be more precisely specified.”
