Farmer convicted for causing an agricultural fire while harvesting during high alert

The Provincial Court of Salamanca has convicted a farmer for a crime of damages due to gross negligence, for causing a fire in a non-forest agricultural area when he continued his work with a combine harvester and a tractor during a period of maximum alert. The incident occurred on June 14, 2022, a day when there was a maximum alert for fire risk issued by the Environment Service of the Junta de Castilla y León due to temperature, wind, and humidity conditions, as the sentence reminds us, which was made known this Thursday. The fire started around 5:00 PM on a plot of the farmer, who was working with the combine harvester and the tractor, despite the maximum alert situation. "The fire was caused by the mechanical action of one of the two machines that the accused was using, who disregarded the maximum alert for adverse conditions favorable to the possibility of causing a fire, and caused damage to 16 plots in the area," the sentence states. Since the farmer assumed the repair of ...