More than 120 cardboard and plastic shacks in which immigrants who work in agricultural work survive have burned down this Saturday in the Huelva town of Lucena del Puerto. A town that has the sad record of being the one in the province that has the most shanties in its fields, more than 2,000, and in which these types of accidents are repeated more than desired. Only in this year 2024 is the third, the second in the same settlement.
The last one began around 7:25 this morning, at which time 112 received a notice alerting that several shanties were burning in the settlement known as ‘El Sevillano’. The 112 mobilized Firefighters from the Huelva Provincial Council, Civil Guard, health workers, Red Cross and Local Police. The first thing was to verify that there were no people affected, and from there, the extinction work began.
The deputy director of Operations of the Provincial Consortium against fires and rescue of Huelva, Joaquín Marfil, has specified that the crews from the Almonte and San Juan del Puerto parks have been moved, with three vehicles with extinguishing capacities of 16,000 and 5,000 liters, which initially controlled the perimeter, facilitated by the absence of wind.
Two crews remain in the area, one from each park, working on finishing work and extracting butane bottles from inside the shacks that have exploded.
The NGO ‘La Carp’, which usually works in these settlements, has activated an emergency device with its resources to care for the evicted people, on a day when those responsible were precisely in the province of Huelva to collect humanitarian aid in the town of Valverde del Camino.
The Red Cross, for its part, has sent an emergency team to the scene of the event that is assisting the evicted with their initial basic needs, including urgently providing them with blankets, among other basic elements.
Precedents in the same area
On June 2, the last fire to date occurred in an immigrant settlement in Lucena del Puerto. That day, around thirty shacks were affected in the Santa Catalina area, with the eviction of around 60 people.
On May 4, the flames affected the same settlement as this Saturday, ‘El Sevillano’, with 34 people (24 men and 10 women) evicted, and 37 shanties destroyed. As on this occasion, all the shanty inhabitants were able to leave the camp in time without suffering personal injury.
Easen Plan
To try to alleviate the situation of these people and find housing alternatives, the Ministry of Social Inclusion, Youth, Families and Equality and the Lucena del Puerto City Council are working within the framework of the first strategic plan promoted by the aforementioned Ministry to eradicate settlements in the provinces of Almería and Huelva.
In 2022, the City Council obtained a subsidy of 251,000 euros for the construction and equipment of a temporary residence and, starting in 2023, the Lucena City Council requests aid from the Regional Government of Andalusia, aimed at local entities, to care for people. Andalusian temporary immigrants and their families.
Thanks to various subsidies, the hiring of the same social worker and a social integrator will continue in 2024. Lucena del Puerto has had 2,115 shanties registered among the twenty settlements spread throughout its municipal area, a figure that remains almost intact today.
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