Orihuela (Alicante) (EFE).- Around a hundred firefighters from the Valencian Community have gathered this Friday before the plenary session of the Consell, held in Orihuela (Alicante), to protest against the creation of the Valencian Emergency Unit (UVE ), approved today.
Members of different firefighters unions of the Community have criticized that this new body supposes the creation of “a beach bar”, they have made a ‘tamborada’ while the plenary session of the Consell met in the Marqués de Rafal palace and, at the entrance of the president , Ximo Puig, have launched a dozen eggs trying to reach him.
The vice president of the Consell, Aitana Mas, who has spoken with some of them, has highlighted at a press conference that “the magnitude of the latest emergencies has shown that reinforcing the fire brigade structure would increase its response capacity in any emergency”. .
“We are taking a further step to take advantage of the structures of the Generalitat and its experience to provide a comprehensive response tool,” Mas stressed.
“It clashes with the functions of the consortium firefighters”
For his part, Josep Palacios, sergeant of the Alicante Fire Consortium, has ensured that the approval of this decree “hits head-on against the functions of the firefighters of the provincial consortiums.”
He has criticized that the approval of this decree is “electoral propaganda that threatens the interests of public officials.”
“They are trying to sell a reunification that is not real, because the draft of the decree does not have any technical criteria”, stressed Palacios, who has insisted that with the UVE “a duplicity” would be created between both bodies and “an increase in the discord”.
Thus, he regretted that this would subtract “competencies that belong to the councils” and would be “to provide materials to a new body when the different consortiums already have those same materials.”
Lastly, it has criticized the fact that the draft “was not agreed upon by any consortium or any council and has only relied on the forest firefighters”, in a new body with which the Consell “opens the doors to a possible privatization in the medium term”, which “may affect the service and working conditions” of the workers.
