Municipalities accuse Senapred of keeping emergency plans paralyzed

On Tuesday, in the commune of Villa Alemana, a meeting was held between the governor of Valparaíso, Rodrigo Mundaca, and 20 mayors and community representatives from the Fifth Region, mainly. The idea was to deal with fire emergencies, preventive and recovery plans. However, the municipalities raised criticism against Senapred because, according to attendees at the meeting, they have not received responses to their emergency plan update for 6 months.

The municipal representatives arrived at Villa Alemana around three-thirty in the afternoon after being summoned by Governor Mundaca. The objective of the meeting was to coordinate the support of the communal governments that are not affected based on the fire crisis. The event ended around six in the afternoon.

Although the meeting achieved its goal, tensions regarding the problems that municipalities have in complying with firefighting regulations were also revealed. This is following the criticism that Mayor Macarena Ripamonti has received regarding the controversy with the Risk Management Plan.

Other mayors in the region and of different political stripes empathize with the mayor, as they accuse that the law that brought about Senapred is bureaucratic and is not in line with the human capacity that the municipalities have. Another of the problems that was alluded to at the meeting in Villa Alemana was that the Senapred of the Valparaíso region does not have its active director.

Mauricio Bustos has been suspended from office for nearly six months due to different accusations against him. Off-screen sources comment that it has to do with labor abuse. It is Felipe Estay who is acting as substitute director. According to witnesses, it was the mayor of Papudo, Claudia Adasme (RN), who raised her voice about the situation, warning that they had not received answers regarding their risk and disaster management plans for a long time. Neither observations nor authorizations.

After his intervention, he asked if more municipalities were in his situation and several agreed. Now, from the Gore of Valparaíso, they maintain that of those 20 municipalities represented, there would be only four that have their emergency plan updated and approved by Senapred.

Mayor Adasme revealed to The counter his perspective on the problem and explained his argument at the meeting: “I am worried that we are always so reactionary, today it is easy to judge municipalities by their Risk and Disaster Management plans, but municipalities have been expressing our concern about the lack of technical support, the lack of resources for the development of the plans and also the role of Senapred.”

The mayor pointed out that there is a deficiency in terms of the “realization of the plans in conjunction with the municipalities and the lack of agility in the review of the plans already made.” In her case, as in others, she accuses, there are plans that were delivered in August 2023 “and many of them have not yet been reviewed.”

The problem for municipalities to prepare these plans, explains the councilor, is the lack of professionals or officials available. Nowadays, indicates Adasme, there are municipal workers who “fulfill double functions, which is why the time to prepare such an important instrument is short, there is no exclusive dedication and the majority of municipalities carry out the plans to be fulfilled.”

That, the mayor points out, when “we are talking about people’s lives” and that is why it is necessary “that these plans are carried out with the support and advice of experts in the field, the technical capacities of the municipalities unfortunately “They don’t always allow us to perform as we would like.” Even more so, she adds, when “a law is implemented without any type of associated resources to support the municipalities.”

The communal chief of Papudo points directly to the implementation of the law, something that is known: “It is repeated in the different Risk Management seminars that we have held in recent years, that the law does not bring funding, even today the gloss The budget has 10 pesos for the implementation of a program or financing for the risk management unit of the Municipalities throughout Chile.”

In short, what the mayor is asking for, and what Ripamonti has also mentioned when she has been questioned about the Risk and Disaster Management Plans, is that a more present and robust Senapred is required.

“The Municipalities of Chile require real support from the competent unit such as Senapred, we do not want to continue lamenting the loss of lives of neighbors for something that we mayors have been asking for for more than a year for support to do things properly,” said Adasme. .

From the Government of Valparaíso they also explain that they warn that the problem of delay in preparing the plans has to do with an issue of financing and bureaucracy.

On January 1, 2023, the National Emergency Office of the Ministry of the Interior (Onemi) was replaced by the National Disaster Prevention and Response Service. One of the changes that this movement brought was the requirement to update its community risk and disaster management plan.

The problem that communities with fewer resources notice is that they do not have the monetary capacity to carry out this study, so they carry out another more basic one that goes through validation by the Ministry of Social Development and only then can they reach the Gore to request resources to update the risk management plan required by Senapred.