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article_detail
Date Published: 22/05/2020
ARCHIVED - Judge suspends Mar Menor contamination hearing due to Covid distancing regs.
The judge simply doesn´t have a room large enough to cater for the number of lawyers who will need to observe social distancing!
This week the Court of Instruction number 2 in Murcia has decided to temporarily suspend its investigations into the activities of more than 100 agricultural companies working around the Mar Menor because there simply isn´t a space available to house all the lawyers who have responded to a request asking for confirmation of their intended attendance at the 20 odd hearings scheduled for this week and respect the social distancing regulations implied by the state of emergency!.
The criminal investigation currently being undertaken by the Court of Instruction number 2 in Murcia, by magistrate Ángel Garrote is generally referred to as the 'Topillo case'. In these proceedings more than a hundred agricultural companies and farmers from the Campo de Cartagena area are suspected of having contributed to the degradation of the Mar Menor through the illegal use of clandestine desalination plants and wells installed in agricultural farms, extracting water illegally from the aquifer below the campo de Cartagena, treating it to remove sufficient salt so that it could be used for irrigation, after which the brackish residual waste generated was dumped back into the aquifer or directly into the Rambla del Albujón and on into the Mar Menor.
The resulting “clean” water was enriched with nitrate fertilisers, used to irrigate crops and leeched into the soil. Excess water drained off into the surrounding ditches and when it rained nitrates and run-off water ran down into the Mar Menor, the levels of nitrates growing to such an extent that the resulting algal bloom changed the constitution of the Mar Menor three years ago.
Illegal farming activity has also diminished the capacity of the land surrounding the Mar Menor to cope with the Gota Fría episodes of heavy rain which have begun to occur more frequently, the result being rivers of red mud which inundate homes surrounding the lagoon and run into the water.
Last week magistrate Ángel Garrote commissioned an expert from the College of Agricultural Engineers of the Region of Murcia to examine the use of a chemical product called Ecoflow 32-A, marketed principally as a product which prevents mineral scale forming in desalination systems. He also asked the expert to look at the use of filter cartridge systems used by the farmers.
The Ecoflow product is a key factor in the prosecution case against the farmers and when the SEPRONA officers, who are the specialist environmental police and form part of the state police, the Guardía Civíl, raided the clandestine desalination plants, they discovered significant quantities of this chemical, and a large number of invoices and nominal delivery notes proving purchase of Ecoflow 32-A by the farmers involved.
One of the Seprona reports shows just one farmer purchasing at least 9,120 kilograms of Ecoflow 32 within two years, a quantity of product sufficient to desalinate 2,368,918 m3 of extracted water, generating 592,207 m3 of saltwater brine, which would have been discharged into the ramblas or aquifer. That's just ONE farmer, indicating the vast scale of the problem.
The defence teams representing the farmers are attempting to disprove the theory of SEPRONA that the product was used for desalinating the extracted water and are attempting to claim that it was instead used as a de-scaling agent to prevent the pipes and nodules of the irrigation system from clogging up.
The principal problem for the agents is proving that this volume of chemicals was used in the processing of water and not in the cleaning of irrigation systems as there is no mechanism for measuring the true volume of illegal water which was actually extracted.
Officers can only work on the hypothesis that the figures quoted accurately reflect the volume of water illegally extracted based on the volume of the chemicals purchased. Equally, it is difficult to prove how much water was used for the irrigation of these fields during the long period in which the extractions and irrigation were taking place.
So the decision last week by the investigating magistrate is an attempt to prevent the complete disintegration of the case by providing some proof that this volume of chemicals could only have been used to desalinate water and not for cleaning irrigation piping. The agriculturalists have also claimed that the desalination plants didn´t work, were built but were never used or rapidly fell into dis-use; proving that they were used, did work, did process an approximate estimation of the volume of water etc is challenging and complex, but without some form of proof as to the scale of the activity, the risk is that the whole case will fall apart.
The magistrate specifically requested the expert investigate how much water is normally treated by one litre of the chemical and if the product is used habitually for de-scaling pipes as is claimed as well as how much water each of the filters habitually purifies during its working life.
This week six further agricultural businesses and representatives of companies selling products to the agricultural sector should have answered questions relating to the sale of, and use of products in the desalination plants discovered.
This week and next around 20 testimonies should have been taken, including those of former senior officials from the Ministry of Agriculture and Water and the Confederación Hidrográfica del Segura (CHS), who are also being investigated for allegedly having failed to control and pursue these alleged irregular actions within the agricultural sector during the course of a number of years (ie turned a blind eye to what was going on).
However, after contacting the defence lawyers to ask how many of them intended to attend the hearings, the judge could only conclude that there wasn´t a big enough space to accommodate them all, taking the Covid-19 social distancing regulations into account, so was left with little option other than to suspend the hearings until either a bigger space could be found or the legislation amended to permit the court hearings to go ahead!
Join the Mar Menor group on Facebook for info about Los Alcázares, San Javier, San Pedro del Pinatar, Torre Pacheco, La Unión and Cartagena and keep up to date with all the latest news and events in the Mar Menor: https://www.facebook.com/groups/MarMenorNewsAndEvents/
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