Eight families continue to live in prefabricated houses eleven years after the Lorca earthquakes

“In my house it is warmer than in the pizzeria where I work. In summer you can’t sleep », she tells LA VERDAD Fátima Elkhattab, a resident of the prefabricated housing town of San Fernando. His family is one of the eight that continue to reside in the modular houses that the Red Cross installed on Sutullena Street, a few meters from the neighborhood where they lived at the time of the catastrophe, in May 2011. The provisional relocation has become Permanently and eleven years after the earthquake, the deterioration of wooden houses is increasing and they present damage, humidity and leaks, according to what some of those affected reported yesterday.

«On stormy nights we cannot sleep, the wood is cracked and the water enters. In August the temperature inside the houses is 50 degrees”, assured Pedro Moreno. The mattress of the bed in which he sleeps in the entrance of his house rests during the day on the facade due to the lack of space inside.

These families, whose members include 15 minors, six of them born during their stay in the town, are desperate. Tamara Javier asked that “if they are going to help us, that they do it before the summer, because the situation is very difficult, especially for the children.”

IU councilor Gloria Martín visited the barracks yesterday and denounced the lack of safety and health in “this makeshift neighborhood.” She said that it is not possible to “normalize the existence of a shantytown in the center” and asked the Autonomous Community to include Lorca in the program for the eradication of shantytowns financed with 7.4 million euros from European Feder funds. Of that money, Martín said, the Ministry of Development has only used four million in the relocation of 200 people from Murcia and Alcantarilla in a vulnerable situation and emphasized that Lorca is the municipality “with the highest risk of social exclusion” without Until now, you have been a beneficiary of the program.

The PP also asked the government team weeks ago to take advantage of the regional housing program to complete the removal of prefabricated houses from the San Fernando neighborhood. The Councilor for Social Services, María Dolores Chumillas, said yesterday that Lorca has already joined this regional mechanism and that the eight homes that it intends to buy from the Community for the supervised relocation of these families have been selected. The case of the town was “frozen” and she announced that the Habito association will visit the proposed houses to verify that they meet the requirements for these families. She also indicated that her department has responded to the requests for repairs made by the residents of the town so far.