“The strategy of prevention and fight against forest fires is taking a result and they recognize it outside our borders, where we are the reference.” Thus, in June, the Ministry of Rural Environment, María Jesús Gómez, the forest policy of the Xunta, defended. He did it in a plenary session of the Parliament of Galicia in which a deputy of the PSDEG claimed a management adapted to the new types of fires, more voracious and difficult to control. Two months later, the community is heading at the close of a month of historical August, in which more than 90,000 hectares have already burned and the worst fires have occurred since there are records.
When Gomez appeared in Parliament to breastfeed his management, on Mount Gallego the vegetation had already grown after a rainy spring, although the first of the intense heat waves of this summer had not yet arrived. The Minister was referred to the 2024 campaign, on which it insisted that it was the best of the last decade. The official data of the Xunta collect that in all that year there were 755 fires, a “historical minimum”. Measured in hectares, it was the third best year since there are records, with 2,645 hectares burned, only above 2014 and 2018.
The socialist deputy who asked her the question, Carmen Rodríguez Dacosta, reminded her that the weather conditions had accompanied during the year 2024. “Vámigame God is what I am going to answer,” replied the Minister, who reproached the socialist group to use words that “become increasingly negative” about the risk of fires and the “abandonment” of the rural one. “It is very discouraging to listen to it,” Gomez said.
“They can be determined to talk that the Rural is abandoned, that causes fires, but the reality is another,” he added, before stating that Galicia produces 50% of the wood in Spain and his mountain is “valued” at 43,000 million euros.
He also defended that in the extinction policy “a single euro is not spared”, an affirmation that clashes against the repeated complaints of workers of the device and unions, who speak of incomplete brigades because they are not covered with low, of motobombs stopped because there are no sufficient drivers to cover the shifts or personnel who continue working only a part of the year -in 2025 months-. The August crisis overflowed the operation and repeated throughout the province of Ourense the images of neighbors fighting with their own means against the flames.
The socialist deputy asked in June to the Xunta that was prepared for the Fifth and Sixth Generation fires, “increasingly extreme” and for those who, warned, the design of the device that was applied in the 90s is not useful.