Monday, August 27, 2007

Vera Sewage




The Spanish can really make something out of the oddest materials. Here - essentially - shit.

This is the view of this morning's presentation of the new and improved sewage station which is located in the Media Legua area in Vera. The Vera town hall want to make it larger and more efficient as there are now many more people living locally than there were when this, ahem, water-treatment plant was first installed in 1992. The water saved from the plant to be used for irrigation, golf courses and so on. The mayor came along today to 'plant the first brick' and to make a speech to the effect of what I've written above. Around four hundred people came to this quite surrealistic event - you may see the entrance to a marquee to the left, some cooks and barmen to the fore, some tables laden with linen, glasses and forks in the centre of my picture and that strip at the back is the sewage plant. Which smells like sewage plants do.

The reason for the interest is because the Junta de Andalucía want to build a still bigger sewage station, big enough to treat seven municipalities' worth of doo doo, at the same site. To do this, they would need to string yet another set of pylons and high-tension cables across some fifty different estates and, as the mayor pointed out today, the Junta's plan calls for the semi-treated waters from their plant to be sent down the (dry) River Antas and, uurgh, out to sea! The mayor is an excellent speaker, and in his remarks this morning, he never once criticised the Seville government, yet he gave the impression that they were fiddling in local affairs where they shouldn't. Finally, the mayor said that he had sent a registered letter to President Rodriguez Zapatero about the issue.

Mojácar has its own sewage plant, behind the go-karts to the rear of Garrucha. The other night, with a strange easterly wind, you could smell it in the Micar valley. A suggestion from the Vera mayor, made a few days ago, was to the effect that the Junta could perhaps use the Mojacar sewage treatment plant for its nefarious purposes.

The problem for the future, as a leaflet thoughtfully printed up by the Vera town hall explains, is that with the ever-increasing number of people coming here to live, there will be acute problems of water, sewerage, communications, electricity, services and the rest of it. In the case of sewerage, from Vera's point of view, the Junta's plan would be catastrophic with '24 million litres of brown water running down the Rio de Antas daily'.

Normally around here, sewage water is pumped out to the sea. Yep, 'fraid so.

1 comment:

El Casareño Inglés said...

You seems to describe Casares very well! At the end of the eighties the GIL party was elected here, and their lasting memorials have been:
1. A new cemetery which is still unused since it has no habitation licence because it was built illegally, and
2. The planta de basura which processes all the waste from the Western Costa del Sol. When the wind blows in the right (wrong) direction, you know it very well. Driving past the plant can literally take your breath away.

Having said that, two good things came out of all this:
1. The GIL party have never been re-elected in Casares, the IU rule the roost, and
2. We pay nothing for our rubbish collections. In fact Marbella pays 400,000 euro a year to our town hall for their collections. Or rather they didn't and our town hall took possession recently of a 4 million euro property in Marbella in lieu of the debt. My mother-in-law, who lives in Estepona has to pay 120 euro a year for her rubbish collection.

Maybe you'll get free water.