alba ✚

When you hear about the forest fires in Spain going on, always keep this in mind: forest firefighters have all been privatized and are under the competency of the respective regional governments; temporary and seasonal contracts are common, meaning most forest firefighters do not work in the colder half of the year, and a significant portion do not ever work more than one season. one firefighter put it like this to me: "someone who is fixing sinks the 30th of May, is putting out fires the next week in June". This means there's constant retraining needed, increasing health and safety risks (for instance, Madrid firefighters still lack proper protection against common carcinogenic substances they encounter) and hindering the accumulation of expertise. In the case of the region of Madrid, their salaries have been the same since 2008, and last summer they went on strike (temporarily paused to deal with forest fires in August) over this. This July they went again on strike, however they paused it to tend to the massive fires in the region.