REACTION
Their profession is said to be suffering, victims of repeated physical and verbal aggression. Wednesday, the national congress of firefighters opens in Vannes in a particularly tense context: fire soldiers face five assaults per day, on 10.000 interventions on average, according to the figures of the Ministry of the Interior. "We are no longer the firefighters who help, we must also protect ourselves", and notes the microphone of Matthieu Belliard, in the morning of Europe 1, Salvatore Scifo, volunteer firefighter in the Drôme.
"When I started in 1990, we were the good samaritans of the population, and now we have verbal and physical aggression, and even murders with what happened in Paris (the 4th of September 2018, a 27-year-old firefighter was stabbed to death in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges by an imbalance, editor's note ", reports this firefighter.
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Better coordination of the different relief corps
While strikes have increased in the barracks in recent months, firefighters are demanding more resources and manpower. "Unfortunately the number of volunteer firefighters is down.There are more departures than recruitment," says Salvatore Scifo. "But there is also prevention to do, civility, inform the public that firefighters are not there to do the job of police and police," he insists.
"We are here to save, but unfortunately we have a coat that looks like that of gendarmes, we are in blue, and we represent the state.With the social movements of the moment, the problem is perhaps there ..." still slips this soldier from the fire.
Another claim: to gather at the same place firemen, policemen and EMS with a single emergency number, the 112. According to firefighters, the establishment of common emergency centers would allow a better treatment of the calls.