With the summer season arriving, the island is preparing to manage the fire emergency. It's a shame that firefighting in Sardinia "is reduced to the bare bones ", so much so that the case ended up in Parliament. This was underlined in a question to the ministers of the Environment, Interior, Defense and Civil Protection by the Sardinian MP Francesca Ghirra (Avs), who asks for reassurances and solutions for the island where «every year tens of thousands of hectares of forests burn and forests."
«The Sardinian region – explains Ghirra – is always particularly at risk due to specific landscape and meteorological conditions: between May and September 2023, 321 interventions were necessary by the helicopters of the regional fleet and 48 by the “Unified Air Operations Centre”, through Canadair. In this context, the Regional Council, with a resolution dated 30 April, approved the latest regional fire-fighting plan " But "the forces involved in fighting fires would be reduced to the bare minimum : in particular it would seem that the Canadair fleet, essential for to be able to shorten intervention times in the event of fire, made available to the police forces involved in fighting fires through the aforementioned "Unified Air Operations Centre", would have shrunk to the point of becoming completely limited, so much so that it could not guarantee the necessary coverage of the territory and at the same time there would be a very strong reduction in the number of teams of personnel in the field with preventive and intervention functions"
To aggravate the situation, there is also the regional tender for the management of the fire prevention campaign for the summer of 2024, with the first three tenders being deserted and the last one, for which «no offer even arrived: no company in the sector would have accepted the conditions of the Region. Sardinia will thus have only 5 aircraft available instead of 14", continues the deputy. Hence the question to understand «what initiatives the Ministers envisage to adequately prepare the fire-fighting campaign to be undertaken in the summer and whether they consider the current supply of personnel and vehicles located throughout the Sardinian territory to be adequate and whether they do not consider their corresponding timely strengthening to be appropriate» .
