Mission Statement: to assist the integration of foreign residents living in Spain
By Laura Taylor • Published: 07 Aug 2020 • 14:16 • <1 minute read
Malaga Firefighters Credit: GERCCMA
Five of Costa del Sol’s best firefighters and four of their specially trained pups have arrived in Beirut to help sift through the rubble. The explosion that ripped throughout Lebanon’s capital city is now considered to be one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in modern history.
They were scheduled to fly out on Wednesday, but the airline was being difficult with the firefighters because of their dogs. Jair Pereira is one of the firefighters from Malaga who has volunteered to help after a shipment of ammonium nitrate in Beirut exploded and caused more than 130 and 4,000 injuries. “The catastrophe is of such an immense magnitude that they are looking for professionals from many fields”, explains Pereira.
Jair, who is a corporal of the Malaga Provincial Firefighters Consortium, is no stranger to tragedies like this one. He is part of the NGO GERCCMA, a group who specialises in canine rescue. They have been involved in the search for disaster survivors all around the world. More specifically, they assisted during the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile in 2010 and the one in Mexico in 2017.
Along with Jair and his colleagues, various teams sent by the European Union will attend. Brussels has decided to urgently dispatch a hundred “highly trained” firefighters, as well as specialized vehicles, dogs and equipment, to assist in rescue efforts.
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Laura Taylor is a graduate from the University of Leeds. At university, she obtained a Bachelors in Communication and Media, as well as a Masters in International Relations. She is half British and half Spanish and resides in Malaga. Her focus when writing news typically encompasses national Spanish news and local news from the Costa del Sol.
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