Orihuela’s Department of Education has been warned on several occasions of the state legislation that regulates the maintenance of fire systems, which establishes that inspections must be carried out on the fire extinguishers every three months.
They need to be fixed in their assigned location and they must not show any signs of damage, they must be adequate to protect the risk of fire, their access cannot be obstructed, they have to be clearly visible and clearly labelled with instructions for use.
However, children are being put at risk in at least eighteen public Infant and Primary schools, because the fire extinguishers, fire-fighting devices and hydrants, according to the local Spanish press, have not been inspected for two years. In some educational centres the last dates back to 2019.
A complaint made by the Ombudsman, to which the Council failed to respond, reveals that the origin of this lack of maintenance, is once again, blamed on the slowness of the processing of contracting files carried out by the municipal administration.
