The Zaragoza Provincial Council has proposed to the firefighters to expand the workforce and make changes in their distribution and working hours to increase safety and modernize the Provincial Fire Fighting Service (SPEI). This has been put on the table at the meeting held this Thursday between representatives of the unions and the Government team of the Provincial Council of Zaragoza.
The negotiation table that took place at the Provincial Council of Zaragoza was attended by the deputy delegate of the SPEI, Alfredo Zaldívar, the deputy delegate of Personnel of the DPZ, José Carlos Tirado, the chief inspector of the SPEI, Raúl Aguilar, and representatives of the unions CCOO, UGT, CSIF and CSL.
In it, the Government team has delivered a document to the union representatives in which different proposals are put forward to analyze, study and evaluate jointly with the aim of improving the organization and provision of the service. It is a document that aims to be the basis for evaluating different alternatives for organization and staff expansion.
INCREASED SECURITY OF TROOPS
The objective, as the union representatives have been informed, is to analyse the size and distribution of the workforce to increase the safety of the staff and improve the organisation, taking into account not only the number of available staff but also the way in which the work is organised and carried out.
To this end, it is proposed to advance in an adequate structure of the service with a distribution of personnel that favors greater coordination of interventions, adequate coverage of the provincial territory and the continuous improvement of the prevention of occupational risks.
The proposed reorganisation involves an increase in staff and a better distribution of the existing staff among the different parks, in order to guarantee greater security to the SPEI staff, provide a better service to the residents of the province of Zaragoza and advance in the adaptation of the SPEI to the provisions established in the applicable regional regulations.
The expansion and better distribution of the workforce would also strengthen the capacity of the parks to respond to interventions, reducing in certain cases the need to wait for the arrival of support from other centers.
THREE PROPOSALS
The document includes three proposals to be assessed. The first pursues a homogeneous model under which the staff would be divided into six groups in each of the nine parks and an ordinary crew per group of one officer and three firefighters. In this way, all the parks would have the same staff structure and the current differences between centres with very different staffing would be eliminated. In this way, the staff would go from the current 163 positions to 223.
The second alternative takes as a reference the structure established in Decree 158/2014 and adapts the provincial network to three levels. A main park is proposed in Ejea de los Caballeros, four secondary parks in Calatayud, La Almunia de Doña Godina, Caspe and Tarazona, and six support parks territorially linked to the previous ones: Zuera, Daroca, Cariñena, Brea de Aragón, El Burgo de Ebro and Tauste. The Decree establishes a minimum crew per shift of five firefighters and one commander for the main park; for the secondary parks, three firefighters and one command; and for the support parks, two firefighters.
The proposal proposes that in the latter the crew is one firefighter and one commander, maintaining two personnel but reinforcing the management capacity of the crew with respect to the minimum composition of two firefighters provided for in the Decree. The third proposal is based on a different idea. Instead of homogenizing only the park crews, it reinforces the intermediate command structure to have greater operational supervision, territorial coordination and preventive presence in interventions.
A staff made up of 6 intervention chiefs, 30 deputy intervention chiefs, 54 officers and 132 firefighters is proposed, with a total of 222 operational positions. The theoretical daily presence would be one intervention chief for the entire province, five deputy chiefs linked to the zones, nine officers – one per park – and 22 firefighters.
Once the different alternatives for expanding and distributing the workforce have been analysed, it is also proposed to address the organisation of the working day to achieve greater safety at work, studying possible alternatives to the current system of 24-hour on-call shifts linked to a time change that improves the current one to increase effectiveness and safety at work.
SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENT EFFORT IN MATERIAL RESOURCES
This approach also comes after the significant effort made by the Provincial Council of Zaragoza in the renovation of the material resources of the Service. Likewise, in 2025 investments were made in vehicles worth 2.4 million euros, while in 2026 2.2 million euros have been allocated to the purchase of two heavy urban pumps, two heavy forestry pumps and a snowplough crane truck.
And in 2027 it is planned to make an investment of almost 3 million euros to acquire five rapid intervention vehicles, two heavy mother pumps and a 42-metre articulated arm.
