Last weekend, the image of the Villasantana Fire Station was circulated on social networks, in which the fire extinguisher car was not visible.
For more than two mayoralties, the leaders of this populated commune insisted on the need for a fire brigade base that would prevent the fires so common there due to carelessness with candles or fraudulent connections to energy, from consuming a large number of homes, most of them built in light given the uncontrolled increase in subnormal settlements.
After several delays in the delivery of the work and questions about the land on which it was built, the station was handed over to the community in May of last year.
During the weekend
Jhon Jairo Pinzón is president of Junta del Remanso and an active leader in all issues related to Villasantana, his complaint was not so new for several sectors of the city, because the absence of the extinguishing machine had already been noted on other occasions by through other people who were wondering the same thing: where is it?
In the video of the complaint Pinzón says that “I have passed this station three times and I do not see the vehicle, I approached the person in charge of security and he responded that since Saturday at 10:00 p.m. a training and it was already 5:00 in the afternoon on Sunday and he had not returned.”
That detail did light the journalistic flame. Are the machines trained? And if they do, because now with Artificial Intelligence anything can happen, why at night? Mr. Pinzón also commented: “It already happened to us, when the fire in Los Lírios, the machine from Cuba arrived first than the one from here, where was it?”
The fire director speaks
Juan Camilo Ballesteros, is the new director of the Official Pereira Fire Department, this medium consulted him about the specified complaint and he responded: “What happened on January 21, was that we carried out a Contingency Plan, since the vast majority of Our firefighters were presenting the tests of the National Civil Service Commission Contest, for this reason we grouped all the vehicles in Base 1, with the purpose of being able to articulate and attend to all emergencies from a single base to handle them, every time. “We had little staff.”
This is the panorama that the B3 parking lot offered yesterday morning.
Regarding the Villasantana machine, Ballesteros reported that “We already know why it was at the Central Station and this weekend we had many emergencies due to vegetation cover fires, one at Villegas Station and we just sent mobile 7, which It is the one that corresponds to Villasantana and later we dispatched it together with mobile 8 to the El Pomo neighborhood sector in Combia, where we also had a large-scale emergency due to vegetation cover that consumed four hectares, so it was there until 7 :00 at night.”
-Director, is the size of this machine easier for rural areas?
“No, what happened was due to the Contingency Plan and we grouped the machines, the others were attending to emergencies and visits due to the earthquake on Friday, so the largest and most capable were the mobiles 7 and 8, to attend to these cases of great magnitude, but in the event that it had coincided with an emergency in Villasantana, we had fire extinguisher cars available to respond to the site,” the director pointed out.
But the crux of the matter is not the availability of machines, but the response time, as stated at the beginning, the distance from the commune from Base 1 and the narrowness of the streets.
Cipher
3,000 gallons of water were needed to address the emergency in Combia.
Given
At this moment the Official Corps of Pereira has 63 units between career and provisional firefighters. The contractors who will enter soon will be around 50.
The Villasantana Station is also the closest to the town of La Bella.
What do you think about the absence of the machine?
Carlos Alberto Valencia – resident of Villasantana
“I don’t know what they make her do, sometimes she’s absent. In all the surroundings there are invasions, it may be that they send them to drain the water, but we have to be more vigilant.”
Ana Viviana Pérez – Villasantana merchant
“It is very important that it is here, because the houses are made of mats and from now on until it arrives all the houses have burned down.”
Jeffrey Morales – Villasantana resident
“It should be present at all times, not just from time to time, because there are many situations here, not just fires.”