There is no estimate of how much it will cost to restore the farmland at La Murada (Orihuela), where more than a million tonnes of rubbish were illegally buried between 2005 and 2011. The number is needed to figure out how much the people who are accused of committing the environmental offence would have to pay in damages. Their trial started last Friday, October 3rd. It hasn’t been decided yet, but it’s known that it will be worth millions of euros. That is, if the courts decide to do so and the administrative decisions follow suit, they should not leave these polluted locations to their own devices.
Distribution
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office says that 500 hectares of land on 11 farms in La Murada (Orihuela) in the districts of Los Vives, Los Sigüenzas, and Los Corrales are polluted by hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubbish. There is another area in the nearby municipality of Abanilla (Murcia).
A substrate that is several meters thick and largely made up of urban trash. However, other sorts of waste have also been found on the surface, like toilets that were literally dumped with dirt. The Provincial Court in Elche has started a trial against people who are thought to be guilty for this environmental crime. Three members of the Fenoll family, who were in charge of the Proambiente dump next to the damaged land for years, are among them. One million tonnes of rubbish. And this number is only going down.
Estimates
The Public Prosecutor’s Office puts a “at least” in front of each of the estimates that technicians make for each of the farms. The ecotoxicology reports in the case show that the waste itself is not dangerous, but leaving it alone is, which has caused leachate, methane gas emissions into the air, contamination of the aquifer in the same area, and a direct effect on plots next to the areas being investigated and on protected areas of the Mediterranean habitat, especially for birds of prey.
However, most of the farms use a lot of water from the Tajo-Segura transfer to grow citrus crops. Also, a lot of trash was found on the bed of the Salada stream, which is a place of special environmental and scenic importance.
Ongoing crime
Five people are facing five years in prison for a crime that is still going on against the environment. The owner of most of the land, on the other hand, is facing seven years in prison. In later hearings, the incidents will make more sense in their context.
To understand how a million tonnes of rubbish may have become soil for farming land, we had to travel back thirty years. The Vega Baja region has had an approved but not yet built zonal waste plan for more than twenty years. This plan was designed to give the region places to get rid of and treat its trash. Proambiente, owned by the Fenoll family, was the only landfill in the Bajo Segura area from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. It had low prices. Proambiente offered to take care of rubbish in Elche or Xixona for less than half the price of 40 euros a tonne, plus transportation fees. The majority of the Vega Baja city councils, whether they were from the PSOE or the PP, were happy. They went to the dump facilities to be pampered by Ángel Fenoll, the patriarch of the family and the then all-powerful garbage magnate. He got a lot of the region’s municipal waste collection contracts this way. Things started to go wrong in 2005 when Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Felipe Briones told the national police to tap the Fenolls’ cell phones and look into their business dealings.
150,000 euros for only two hectares that were poisoned
Along with the 11 properties in the province of Alicante that were affected by landfilling (with the owners’ permission), one landowner who lived adjacent to the landfill sites reported how these actions hurt his own properties because of leachate contamination. In the Elche City of Justice case, he is designated as a private prosecutor. The value of his land, which hasn’t been farmed since then, is estimated to be €150,000 for just two hectares. The waste was dumped on 500 hectares of land.
Brugal
It was the start of Operation Brugal, which led to searches in 2007 and 2009 and the end of Don Ángel and his family’s commercial riches. The conversations revealed many other irregularities, including the rubbish burial methods that Proambiente, located between Abanilla and Orihuela, allegedly had to use because the Murcia and Valencian governments, along with Brugal and growing neighbourhood protests, had focused on the landfill’s lack of conditions and capacity and its constant incidents, and were not going to allow it to grow. The research found that Proambiente buried the untreated trash on farms. The landfill was sealed, and the leachate was emptied every so often. This cost 8 million euros and concluded in 2021. It cost another 6 million euros to keep it up. The government paid. It currently costs over 100 euros to bury each tonne of rubbish in a legal place…
Author: Derek Appleton
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