Councilor Antonio Luengo assures that this situation “puts the state” of the lagoon at maximum risk “and leads it to a new environmental crisis”
The regional government criticized this Friday of “the incoherent decision of the Ministry to paralyze the pumping of the Rambla del Albujón”, which must prevent the entry of fresh water and nutrients into the ecosystem. This situation, according to the Executive, »puts the state of the Mar Menor at maximum risk and leads it to a new environmental crisis, as happened in 2019, in 2021 or this year when its stoppage caused a ‘boom’ of algae« .
This was stated by the Minister of Water, Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Environment and Emergencies, Antonio Luengo, who chaired the Mar Menor Inter-administrative Coordination Forum meeting in San Pedro del Pinatar. “The pumping cannot be stopped for a single day due to a political decision, they must resume their operation since it does not depend on any authorization,” he explained.
Luengo stressed that “they cannot try to confuse the activity carried out by the pumping with the spillway built just two years ago as an adjoining infrastructure to act in case of breakage, while the first has been built for about twenty years,” according to government sources. region in a statement.
The head of Water recalled that “the Government of Spain buried the Zero Discharge Project and refuses to undertake the urgent measures indicated by the scientific community, such as collecting water from the boulevards and lowering the level of the aquifer.” In addition, he said, “they continuously paralyze the only palliative action that exists to reduce the entry of water through the Albujón.”
At the meeting of the Inter-administrative Coordination Forum of the Mar Menor, in which the municipalities of San Pedro del Pinatar, Cartagena and San Javier were represented, the status of the projects for the recovery and protection of the ecosystem was discussed.
Luengo referred to the absences of representatives of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition, Los Alcázares, the Demarcation of State Coasts and the Segura Hydrographic Confederation, and described them as “especially worrying, given that important issues must be discussed in this common Forum, not in the media or through writings that only delay the deadlines’.
Evolution of the parameters
For his part, the spokesman for the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Mar Menor, Emilio María Dolores, has reported on the evolution of the physical-chemical parameters that allow knowing the state of the ecosystem. He specified that, as of June 17, the average oxygen level was 6.66 mg/l, chlorophyll 0.54 mg/l, temperature 27.75 degrees Celsius and turbidity 1, 16 FTUs.
To date, more than 10,500 tons of biomass have been removed from the Mar Menor, “which helps prevent the degradation of the ecosystem, by also involving the removal of nitrogen and phosphorus,” said the spokesman. Finally, he warned that “the stoppage of the pumping of the Albujón boulevard has caused the water inlet to double, which means that 4,650 kilograms of nitrates and more than 50 of phosphates are entering the Mar Menor every day.”
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