The interventions of the Burgos Firefighters in home fires are on the rise. In the absence of the Burgos park making the usual annual balance in the month of March with the presentation of the report, the data provided by 1-1-2 highlight the increase.
Last year, the 1-1-2 emergency center received 32 notices in the capital for fires in homes. This data only includes calls for fires, not for those notices in which smoke is alerted and the Firefighters come to carry out a check which, if it is finally confirmed that there is no fire, is not included in these statistics.
According to this data, there were only two months, June and July, in which no 1-1-2 notifications were received for home fires. The month with the most fire warnings was September, with five emergency alerts, followed by December and January, with four warnings. In this sense, it must be remembered that in these two months there were fatalities.
The Burgos Post Office | The World
The year 2024 began tragically in Burgos. On January 12, an 89-year-old woman died in a fire in a home on Calleja and Zurita streets. The victim’s caregiver tried to get her out of the house without success and she finally had to jump out of the window in a fire in which several people had to be treated for smoke poisoning. The smoke had spread along the façade and penetrated other homes in the building, causing several neighbors to have to be treated for poisoning.
January would leave a second victim, this time in the province, and in circumstances similar to the event in the capital. On January 27, an 89-year-old woman died in the fire that broke out in her home in Mazuela. A 44-year-old woman who was responsible for his care was also injured in the fire. The caregiver was on the upper floor of the house and the 89-year-old woman, who had reduced mobility, was in a room on the ground floor of the house. It was in that room, where this woman was sleeping, where the fire started.
-The third death in a fire, the second in the capital, was recorded on December 6. A 75-year-old man died in a fire that broke out in a house at number 40 Alfonso X El Sabio Street. In the rest of the months of the year in which there were warnings, except November, there were at least three calls to 1-1-2 for fires.
Whenever there is a fire in a home, especially when the consequences have been tragic or could have been, as in the recent one in Plaza Foramontanos, the Firefighters remember a series of recommendations. One of them is the placement of smoke detectors. It is not from now, nor from a few years ago. It is a recommendation that already in 2014, when the six members of a family died in a fire in a rural house in Tordómar, the then head of the Burgos park, Julio Estébanez, already proposed.
The current Burgos Fire Chief, Miguel Ángel Extremo, was one of the first challenges he posed when he took office, to extend the use of smoke detectors in homes, with special emphasis on homes inhabited by elderly people.
A recommendation that the Burgos Fire Station considers should be transformed into a regulation of a device that is cheap, easy to install and that has been proven to “save lives.” The regulations of the Burgos City Council do not require the installation of smoke detectors in homes, but it is a growing trend in other municipalities. This is the case of the Valladolid City Council, which will regulate the obligation to install these elements in homes starting this year.
The second piece of advice that the Firefighters take up when fires like the one in the Plaza de Foramontanos occur is to ‘close the door to the fire’. When a fire breaks out at home, instinct can lead us to run out of the house, to leave the room where the fire has broken out without closing the doors, which, Burgos Park insists, causes the flames to spread. more quickly. For this reason, they emphasize that the doors must be closed and in the case of the residents of the property, they should stay in their homes and not go out.
