A forest firefighter dismantles Ayuso's preventive management of fires in 'Malas Lenguas': "Minimal prevention is done"

Alfonso Ferrero, forest firefighter of the Community of Madrid, has questioned the preventive management of Madrid's forests during an intervention on Malas Lenguas (La 2), where he rejected that the debate on fires can be reduced solely to forest cleaning and warned that the prevention currently carried out is clearly insufficient.

Ferrero thus responded to the political debate opened in recent days, after the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, insisted on the need to clean the forests and the President of the Government accused those who simplify the origin of fires of spreading hoaxes. According to the firefighter, professionals in the sector and inhabitants of rural areas have been denouncing the same difficulties for years in keeping the territory in good condition.

In this regard, he pointed out that fewer and fewer people are dedicated to these tasks and defended that administrations should reinforce the resources allocated to prevention. "It has been reduced, minimal prevention is done in the Community of Madrid," he stated.

As an example, he explained that in the region only about 6,000 hectares are acted upon through preventive work, of which about 4,000 correspond to actions linked to extensive livestock farming and between 1,800 and 1,900 hectares to firebreak cleaning, thinning, and maintenance tasks carried out mainly by Tragsa and other entities.

In contrast to these figures, Ferrero recalled that the Community of Madrid has 426,000 hectares of vegetation, so preventive actions barely reach between 1.5% and 1.6% of the area at risk of fire; of the "territory prone to burning". In his opinion, these data reflect the need to increase investment and personnel allocated to forest management to reduce the impact of future large fires.