Filenews 7 August 2021 - by Vasos Vassiliou, Dora Christodoulou
The next time a fire breaks out, citizens should be aware that only 12 employees of the Department of Forests are responsible for monitoring 70,000 hectares or 700,000 acres in the forest of Paphos which starts from the Bridge of Pedoulon and extends west to the outskirts of Akamas and which is the largest forest in Cyprus.
Considering that each hectare has an area of 10,000 square meters one realizes the risks to the environment of Cyprus but also to the forest itself. It is also worth noting that after 7:30pm. until the morning of the next day there are no employees of the Department of Forests on alert, which led to the destruction of more than 25% of the Forest of Mountaineers in Paphos by a fire that broke out at 12 midnight and was noticed on... 3am
However, while there was some form of monitoring in 2019, no people were found in 2020 to undertake the task of forest surveillance.
Tragic for forest safety is also considered the fact that forest rangers start work at 7:30am. and employees at 9am. A regime that was also in force in the Salia fire in 2016 which means that valuable time has been lost, since the first 1-2 hours are decisive in the effort to deal with the fire. An official of the Department of Forestry told "F" that the specific reality for which the Department is not responsible is in itself catastrophic.
The problems in forest surveillance during the night began in 2003 when harmonising legislation was adopted under which officials of the Department of Forestry should not work beyond hours. It seems that at that time the need to guard forests was not urgently put into the EU and so forests would remain unattended, which is why the government set shifts by strengthening the Forestry Department with 34 new posts and in 2009 they were included in the budget. Two years later, due to the economic crisis, the posts were removed from the budget and in addition to the 34 that were indirectly abolished, the total number of vacancies in the Department increaed to 60.
It is worth noting that at that time there were about ten stations within the forests and about another 18 points outside the forests (such as Galia, Poimos, Stavros Psokas, Kakomalis, Bridge of Panagia, etc.) from which the forests were supervised and, in case of fire, the extinguishing system was activated.
Another peculiarity is that forest patrols are currently carried out by workers and not by forestry officials.
Both Officials of the Department of Forestry and its staff consider the reopening of the Forest College as it was – before it was suspended for economic reasons in 2013 and from which they graduated "leaders" in extinguishing fires.
The claim of current and former officials of the Department of Forestry is that the reopening of the College, as conceived by the leaders of the Ministry of Agriculture, will prove to be a fiasco since it will not contribute to the protection of forests but to the safeguarding of jobs for people who will not be able to throw themselves into the forest and lead efforts to extinguish fires. According to the same officials, the aim of the Department of Forestry in a fire is to cut it off from the rest of the forest, where its effort is focused on creating a zone around the fire so that it is trapped and does not move, which requires specialization.
The need to reopen forest stations for forest monitoring was also stressed so that firefighting forces could be mobilised immediately in the event of a fire.
Tala community takes care of its own armour.
With the recent devastating moments experienced by the community, with houses, cars and other properties of its inhabitants becoming north of the fire, but also daily images of destruction from the rest of Cyprus and Greece due to the fires, the Community Authority of Talas has already taken action to ensure that similar tragedies such as this year's ones do not happen again or at least the community is as "armoured" as possible.
In this context, the Talas Community Council set out immediately after last month's terrible fire a plan to shield the community with fire-fighting projects in order to minimise the possibility of similar disasters in the future. For days now crews with special heavy machinery have been building fire zones, which will create obstacles to the promotion of a fire front, but also allow the immediate and drastic intervention of firefighting forces at the heart of the problem.
Speaking yesterday to "F", the president of the Community Council of Talas, Areti Pieridou, stressed that the fire-fighting shielding of Tala has been treated for some time as a matter of the highest priority by the local authority. The major disasters, which this time were not limited to the natural environment, but literally entered people's homes, she stressed, made it all the more imperative to complete the settlement protection projects, which we had already put in place.
"That's why," said Mrs Pieridou, "in recent weeks we have put in place an extensive fire ring design that essentially covers our entire area of responsibility. Already, fire lanes have been constructed in various areas of Tala that show dense vegetation and at the same time are adjacent to residential developments, to ensure that there will never again be a corresponding disaster like the one we experienced earlier this summer."
