After the surprise, the fear and the tragedy, after the dead and the destruction, after the pain and anger, there remains the garbage of the flood. Tons of scrap metal, rubble, furniture and caked-on mud that must be removed and recycled. Material as dirty as it is polluting, which is also one of the tragic effects of DANA that devastated the towns south of Valencia on October 29. A danger that is not a chimera, that is already a murky reality, as the two highly toxic fires in Alberic and Catarroja have demonstrated.
The piles of destroyed cars, on the edge of roads, squares, lots and industrial estates, provoke spectacular images, as if they were conceptual and apocalyptic sculptures.
Many residents of the towns affected by DANA are beginning to worry about the health problems that this may cause if the garbage cleanup process continues for too long. It is a very complex issue due to the phenomenal volume of waste accumulated in a single day and the eternal lack of resources.
Julio Valera, responsible for Water and Waste at Greenpeace, tells how the issue of waste is being addressed in the municipalities affected by DANA in Valencia. “Now,” he says, “we are still in the cleaning phase of the homes, the ground floors, the streets.” “There are still quite a few basements with sludge in Catarroja, for example. So the removal of waste is a second phase that has not yet been resolved. The affected neighbors see the waste being deposited a few meters from their homes and are scared. “They need to get that off their backs soon.”
The fear of bacteria, rats and pollution worries the residents of Catarroja, Sedaví, Massanassa… They see how the mountains of garbage grow around them and that external aid has been decreasing. They no longer find firefighters on the streets, the number of soldiers has been reduced and also the number of volunteers.
“What is happening is that waste is accumulating everywhere, until that waste can be managed correctly,” continues Julio Valera. “All this is being left in spaces located within the municipalities, with, for example, esplanades full of cars very close to homes. It is logical that this is of concern, especially with these recent fires. If this process is prolonged, there may be possible health complications, mainly for the most vulnerable.”
Such is the case of Carmelo Casañ, a 70-year-old resident of Catarroja, who sees with concern that on Milagro Street, right in front of his mother’s house, four or five meters away, the height of the accumulated cars does not stop. to grow. He fears for his mother’s health.
We are afraid that they will forget about us and leave us like this, with the garbage in front of us.
A neighbor from Catarroja
Carmelo cannot sleep well at night because of the nightmares he experienced on the fateful day. In the darkness he saw how several neighbors threw ropes made of sheets, while others used flashlights and cell phones to save four people from the ground floor of their building, where the water reached more than two meters high in the area of the building. yard. Carmelo was also able to alert his two children by cell phone so that they did not continue their trip back to Catarroja. A few minutes later the power and telephone lines were cut.
María, another resident of Catarroja, now contemplates how the green area next to her home on Avenida Rei Jaume I has become a landfill and a car cemetery. The vehicle towers reach tens of meters high. “It scares us a lot that they forget about us and leave us like this, with the garbage in front of us,” he says.
Julio Valera, from Greenpeace, continues explaining: “In a single day, more waste has been generated than is generated in an entire year in the entire Valencian Community.” There are hundreds of thousands of tons that have to be removed, not only of mud, but of vehicles, garbage, debris, furniture, everything.
The sludge is being transferred to a quarry and that also includes the contents of the sewers plus the oils and gasoline from cars, gas stations and workshops. It is an amazing cocktail that is impossible to separate and regenerate. In the garbage containers, there are trees, furniture, appliances, everything, so it will be very difficult to separate and recycle them. A true task of Hercules.
Asunción Hidalgo, Chemical Engineer and Professor at the University of Murcia, comments: “It is not known how all this waste is going to be processed, due to the variety of materials and because they are all together. The difficulty is that there is a lot of different waste and that it is very mixed with each other, in addition to the fact that there is a large volume, this is going to make correct waste management at an environmental level difficult.”
The main problem: non-metallic waste
Cleaning up all that debris, all those cars, all that sludge, all that garbage will take months. All the garbage trucks in Barcelona and Madrid would have to go after them. “The metallic,” says Julio Varela, “can be the easiest to recover, because it has value in the market and can be extracted with magnets.” There is talk of 120,000 thousand cars that are going to go to scrapyards. The main problem is things that are not metal. Furniture, sofas, cabinets, plastics… all of this will end up being shredded together.
There are 70 or 80 affected towns, Catarroja, Sedaví, Massanassa, Benetússer, Paiporta, Alfafar… Right now there is no human capacity to remove all of that quickly enough to avoid additional health and pollution problems.
Cars can be recovered as scrap metal, but even this is a time-consuming task. You have to remove it with a tow truck car by car and take it to its destination. But you have to see who owns those cars and what their insurance is. “You can’t take those cars lightly, because each one has an owner. And if you can no longer recover it, you should at least try to collect the insurance money,” says Julio Varela.
The decontamination and elimination process of each vehicle is accredited by the Certificate of Destruction, which justifies its definitive removal from the records of the General Directorate of Traffic. “I don’t know how all of this is going to be managed, given the magnitude of the catastrophe,” says Asunción Hidalgo, Chemical Engineer. “There are,” he continues, “the Authorized Vehicle Treatment Centers, CAT. In these places they remove dangerous substances, brake fluids and engine oils are very polluting, to begin with. Correct environmental management is required.”
There were many vehicles in the area affected by DANA, many vehicles parked on both sides of very narrow streets. The flood dragged them until they turned into terrifying metal towers. Julio Varela equates Valencia’s DANA to Hurricane Catrina that devastated New Orleans, but in the American city it was possible to evacuate earlier due to the better functioning of the forecast and warning.
A common comment in Zone 0 of the Valencian catastrophe It looks like a war scene. The operation of water purification plants for municipalities is worrying. The dust that floats in these towns is disturbing. A dust loaded, without a doubt, with toxic elements. The accumulation of garbage is disturbing. Neighbors hope that the sludge and all organic waste can be completely removed before next summer. They fear that, if they cannot do so, the plagues of mosquitoes and all types of insects, as well as rats, will multiply. Now there is organic garbage everywhere, as if it were the result of a colossal garbage strike. Where will all that dirt go? At the moment, people want it out of the way.
#garbage #flood #months
