A summer against fire on a useless helitransported base in León: “It takes us an hour and a half to get here by car and it would be 15 minutes by helicopter”
The firefighters operating at the Oterico facilities manage to use a helipad halfway through the campaign and with several patches.
The helitransport base in El Oterico (León) cost almost two million euros, it was announced in 2022 and it was highlighted that by the end of 2023 it would be “practically finished”. The firefighters who work there in the summer of 2026 have not been able to use it until a few days ago for the aerial means for which it was conceived because it did not comply with the necessary safety and operability requirements and was not fully completed: “Having it inoperable on August 1st would be a terrible mistake”.
The base, with sandstone soil that disables most of its runways, is simply closed to livestock with an electric fence set up by the brigade members and the fuel tanks have been left unlocked for weeks. Despite the recent opening, there is hardly any coverage and they do not have a landline phone and the showers also do not work in facilities that are key to dominating the central Leonese mountain, repeatedly ravaged by fires like those often seen very close from Oterico.
A firefighter expresses the disruption of recent fires like this: “It takes us an hour and a half by car and it would take 15 minutes by flying”.
Translated by urgent.news from El Pais's report; automated translation may contain errors. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
