The Government Council, upon proposal from the Ministry of the Interior, Emergencies and land use planningapproved the system of Special Emergency Civil Protection Plan for forest fires in the Murcia region (Infomur Plan), which sets the periods of fire risk, guard staff and human and material resources, for the 2024-2025 season.
The Infomur Plan establishes the hierarchical and functional organization as well as the methods of action aimed at protecting people, property and the environment in the event of a forest fire. It mobilizes more than 450 people daily in its coordination, monitoring and extinguishing systems. to act with maximum efficiency.
The device reinforces the troops in the extinction operation this year. Thus, one more rapid intervention brigade is formed in 2023 and the number of forest firefighters of the Cieza forestry brigade (which goes from 6 daily members to 13).
The period between June 1 and September 30 is established as a high risk period with maximum alert and all resources available. At medium risk, two periods are established, from April 1 to May 31 and from October 1 to October 31. Finally, with low risk, the period from November 1 to March 31 is established.
For monitoring, in times of high risk, the Plan It has 20 fixed points strategically distributed across the main natural spaces of the Region, around thirty pairs of municipal Civil Protection volunteers on mobile surveillance, plus one surveillance helicopter and coordination which flies daily over the main natural spaces of the Region.
The Plan Infomur operation has, for extinction missions, three helicopters which, in addition to their water evacuation capacity, can transport forestry brigades. They are based in Alcantarilla, Sierra de la Pila (Abarán) and Zarcilla de Ramos (Lorca). This It is planned that a fourth state-owned firefighting helicopterjoined the operation during the high risk period at the La Alberquilla base (Caravaca de la Cruz).
The extinguishing device is also composed of 19 forestry brigades earthly, 5 rapid intervention brigades, 11 municipal first aid brigades and firefighters of the Fire Extinguishing and Rescue Consortium of the Region of Murcia and the municipalities of Murcia and Cartagena. In coordination with Work plan for extinguishing techniciansenvironmental officers, base area coordinators, operations managers and information managers.
The Infomur Plan also envisages the ‘Foreign Action Chronicle‘, which is the basic unit of land movement, means which is transferred when necessary to another autonomous community (21 people between firefighter technician, environmental agents, forest firefighters, analyst, safety officer, foreman and liaison). Last year, the chronicles of foreign action of the Infomur plan turned into fires in Villanueva du Viver (Castellón), Montichelvo (Valencia) and Quebec (Canada).
The Region of Murcia has a forest area of 497,331 hectares, which represent almost 44 percent of the surface area of the Autonomous Community. During the year 2023, the funds allocated to the Infomur plan extinguished a total of 132 forest fires which affected 43.82 hectares of land.
Two, only 13 affected more than one hectare field and the rest (more than 90 percent) remained in attempt, which shows the effectiveness of the detection and extinction devices. The largest of these took place on October 19 in El Llano del Beal (Cartagena) and affected 4.8 hectares of forest land.