The revenge of the Mar Menor is at hand as the EU starts legal proceedings against Spain and the courts find 39 companies guilty of contamination and open proceedings against former high executives of the Water Board and regional government.
Today the European Commission has decided to take Spain to the EU Tribunal of Justice for failing to take “sufficient measures” against the contamination by nitrates in Murcia and other provinces.
Brussels had already warned the Spanish Government several times for failing to control the use of nitrogenous fertilizers which contaminate masses of superficial and subterranean water, like the Mar Menor, and the aquifer in the “Campo de Cartagena”.
Here in the Murcia region a court has laid the blame for dumping
5,900 million litres of nitrates in river beds, reservoirs and subsoils and extracting an “exorbitant quantity” of water from the aquifer in Cartagena on 39 companies in the “caso Topillo.”
In total the magistrates point to 39 companies and individuals, which operate in the Campo de Cartagena, using the same methods. The economic cost of the damage is estimated at almost 20 million euros.
Those in charge of these companies now face the possibility of two years in prison for a crime against the environment.
The Judge, Ángel Garrote, has also made it clear that top executives at the Confederación Hidrográfica del Segura allowed the illegal extraction of water from aquifer by companies using machinery and dumping excess water provoking a “significant quantity of salmuera (nitrates)” being poured into the Mar Menor “causing catastrophic, irreversible and irreparable damage.”
Legal proceedings have also begun against the former Head of the regional Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, Antonio Cerdá; the former President of the Confederación Hidrográfica del Segura, Rosario Quesada; and the former Commissioner of Water for the Confederation, Manuel Aldeguer, for an alleged offence of environmental prevarication (malfeasance/obstruction) for failing to install controls in the agricultural area and failing to control illegal desalinations
