LOCAL FIRE FIGHTERS STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT

A lack of available resources is testing rescue services to the limit, with lives potentially at risk due to a number of concurrent incidents leading to the unavailability of fire fighters.

On Wednesday of this week three incidents occurred at the same time that forced Elche fire fighters to prioritise their attention. One incident call was to open a home in El Altet where a child had become locked in alone in the third floor apartment.

Almost immediately as they responded to this call they were called to attend a vehicle crash on the A-70 motorway when one of the vehicles had caught fire.
A call was made to attend a Seat car that had caught fire in Crevillente whilst a fire in a cafe in Santa Pola was also reported with a large amount of smoke coming from the kitchen.

All of these incidents meant that there was no further cover available in the area as the crews battled to bring these fires under control and attend the other emergency calls.

The provincial fire consortium made arrangements to transfer resources to Elche, but by the time this had been organised there was no need.

The situation is not unique to this area. In Lugo this week a car crashed into a tanker and suffered considerable damage, trapping the car occupants inside.

However, the delay in fire fighters being able to attend this crash was a life and death situation that forced the Guardia Civil staff attending the scene to extract the occupants themselves, who were then transferred to hospital, one by helicopter, for emergency treatment.

Although the tanker was carrying foodstuff rather than flammable liquid, the situation could still have been a lot worse had it not been for the swift actions of those at the scene.

Emergency services have suffered a tremendous amount of cuts in recent years, with both fire and rescue and emergency medical provisions seeing huge cuts from the budgets, many of which some people believe are only just starting to show when the number of emergencies outweigh the number of teams on had to deal with situations which can mean a matter of life or death.

Filed under: http://www.theleader.info/article/46944/

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