- Collapse. Five months after the Zaldibar tragedy: "Urkullu should have asked the UME for help"
- The case: the owner and two people in charge of the Zaldibar landfill have been arrested for the collapse in which two workers died
- The accident. Two people are sought after a "large" landslide
Six months ago, thousands of tons of garbage buried Joaquín Beltrán and Alberto Solaluze. Today, 180 days after that fateful day in which the Zaldibar landfill collapsed on the A-8 highway that connects Bilbao with San Sebastián, dragging everything in its path, the bodies of these workers still do not appear , entangling a crisis with ramifications legal, environmental and also political, which will mark the new legislature of Iñigo Urkullu.
After the arrest of the owner and two other managers of the company Verter Recycling, owner of the landfill, on July 21, and his release three days later with precautionary measures after being accused by the judge of reckless manslaughter, many questions remain for settle in the judicial field . The first of these, if these three managers, the owner, Juan Ignacio Barinaga , the technical manager, Juan Etxebarria , and the managing director, Arrate Bilbao , could have avoided the catastrophe.
According to Ertzaintza's investigation, the company had reports on the table that found cracks in the structure of the landfill. Reports that, according to the company, in no case alerted of an imminent danger of collapse and were to be analyzed on March 7. They did not arrive on time. The collapse, and the death of Joaquín and Alberto, occurred around 4:00 p.m. on the 6th.
But regardless of the judicial consequences, the Zaldibar crisis has a clear political side. The collapse of the landfill and the two workers still buried constitute one of the biggest blots of the management of Iñigo Urkullu during the last legislature, and will mark the one that has just begun.
The concentration that the Zaldibar Argitu association, focused on clarifying everything that surrounded the collapse and the unsuccessful search for workers, carried out at the gates of the Basque Parliament last Monday, coinciding with the constitution of the Chamber, were no more than the prelude to a marking to which the opposition will submit Urkullu with this theme as the epicenter as soon as the new Basque Government is launched in September and the work of the renewed Parliament begins.
The pandemic to a certain extent left the issue in the background during the electoral campaign, but after the elections and reactivated the case in the judicial sphere with the imputation of the owners, all the opposition, -EH Bildu, Elkarrekin Podemos and PP-Cs They have already expressed their intention to promote a commission of inquiry in the Basque Parliament to clarify political responsibilities.
It is true that PNV and PSE-EE, former government partners and who are now negotiating to repeat the coalition Executive, now have an absolute majority in Parliament that can sweep away any opposition proposal. But the Zaldibar crisis has such depth from the political, environmental, and above all social point of view, because it must be borne in mind that there are still two missing workers, who will weigh like a slab on the Government if it is closed to clarification. completely the reasons that led to that landfill to collapse like a house of cards, and the reason for a six-month search for the bodies, for the moment, continues without giving any results, to the despair of the families, and after Urkullu will reject any type of external aid, such as that provided by the central government for the Emergency Military Unit (EMU) to intervene in the search efforts.
The Basque Government has always defended that all responsibility falls on the owner company , rejecting that it had something to do with the possibility that the landfill was already operating, with reports alerting of cracks that could have led to its closure. The company itself assures that it did not get to communicate it to the Basque Government -the collapse of the landfill was ahead of it- and sources from the Basque Department of the Environment insisted yesterday that at no time was it aware of any report that would have led to the work stoppage in the landfill. “ If we had known them, we would have paralyzed the work. Perhaps, the collapse could not have been avoided, but nobody would have died , "they pointed out.
But the truth is that the landfill worked for many years, at least apparently, without a control that was supposed to exist for this type of activity. From the outset, Zaldibar, which had an estimated useful life until the year 2046, was going to exhaust its capacity to store the 2,744,975 cubic meters of volume in the year 2022 in an excessive growth.
The opposition looks directly at Iñaki Arriola , Minister of the Environment and PSE heavyweight, as responsible for the lack of control of the facilities. It remains to be seen whether he repeats himself in the new Basque Executive, whether he is finally a coalition, or whether he remains a margin. Its presence or not in the Executive could be the first gesture of the new Government on how it is going to face the pending crisis in Zaldibar.
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