The Provincial Fire Consortium and the Firefighters of the Castellón City Council have established a joint working protocol for operations in bordering areas. The President of the Provincial Council and Consortium, Marta Barrachina, and the Mayor of Castellón, Begoña Carrasco, along with the Minister of Emergencies and Interior, Juan Carlos Valderrama, have formalized this agreement to jointly and coordinatedly address emergencies in areas sharing intervention perimeters.
The event, held at the Casa dels Caragols, was also attended by the Regional Secretary of Emergencies and Interior, Fernando Lasheras, and the Director General of SPEIS Coordination, Andrés Balfagó. President Barrachina highlighted that the agreement consolidates an existing collaboration to make it more effective, valuing joint material and human resources to provide the best service to citizens and ensure a rapid, coordinated response to any emergency.
For her part, Mayor Carrasco emphasized that the agreement provides greater legal certainty to a collaboration that Castellón has always offered. She recalled that the municipality is the only one in the province with its own fire department and that they have always responded to calls, citing interventions such as the DANA flood, fires in León, or recent events in Soneja. The agreement, according to Carrasco, strengthens coordination and optimizes available resources, benefiting both Castellón and the province.
The main objective of the protocol is to optimize the operational actions of the Fire Prevention and Extinction and Rescue Services (SPEIS) in areas bordering their respective territorial intervention scopes. The document defines the shared intervention zones, types of joint services, incident notification protocols, and coordination in operations. The bordering areas include Castellón de la Plana, l’Alcora, Almassora, Benicàssim, Borriol, La Pobla Tornesa, Sant Joan de Moró, Vall d’Alba, and Vilafamés.
Joint services cover fires, rescues, traffic accidents, victim rescues, intense rainfall episodes, gas leaks or water supply network issues, and emergencies activating a civil protection plan. The collaboration, coordinated by the 112 of the Generalitat Valenciana, will be automatically activated for emergencies in the established areas, with real-time information and unified command protocols. The agreement also includes joint training and evaluation meetings.
