"At this moment, the project is in the contracting phase so that the Ministry of the Environment can put the work out to tender and it will be published in the bulletin in the first quarter of 2006." This is what the mayor of Tías, José Juan Cruz Saavedra, said this Friday to determine the situation of the project that he believes will end the controversy surrounding the spills that occur in Puerto del Carmen.
The highest authority of the Tías Town Hall clarified to this editorial team that, in coordination with other institutions, they have made an "important effort" to try to solve the problem of the spills that are mainly occurring in Puerto del Carmen, the latest of which was in an area as well-known as Avenida de Las Playas, near the Aparthotel Fariones. Before going into the technical details of the work they have promoted, he recalled the same thing that Insular de Aguas de Lanzarote (INALSA) did the day before, the undeniable fact that some uncivil citizens who have been throwing all kinds of things into the network are partly to blame for some of the spills. In fact, as this newspaper reported in yesterday's edition, the CEO of Inalsa, Mario Pérez, made a call for civility to the society of Lanzarote, with the aim of "stopping the indiscriminate dumping of old and disused objects into the sanitation pipes of the network", assuring that "we have verified that groups of citizens are abandoning their waste or placing large stones in certain pipes, which causes significant obstructions that prevent the correct functioning of the network". "We know that some pipes are not in perfect condition, but these actions only harm and hinder the provision of our service," explained the head of the water company.
In this line, Cruz Saavedra also highlighted the fact that the pipes "are not the best possible", which, added to that singular and censurable behavior of some individuals, has caused all kinds of problems. "Curiously, we are talking about a phenomenon that has not only occurred in Puerto del Carmen but has also been recorded in places like Playa Blanca or Arrecife," he recalled.
Apart from these issues, he emphasized the effort that his Town Hall has made in the Sectorial Sanitation Plan to improve the pipes in that area. "It must be taken into account that when the sanitation was built in Puerto del Carmen, the provision for rainwater was not made. At this moment, our commitment is to build the rainwater network in Puerto del Carmen," he asserted emphatically.
To make it possible, last Thursday he traveled to Madrid in the company of the senator for the island of Lanzarote, Marcos Hernández, and the Director-General of Water of the Government of the Canary Islands, Orlando Umpiérrez. There they met with the Director-General of Water of the central government, Jaime Palau, supervising the technical project that the Government of the Canary Islands has drafted for the sanitation network of Puerto del Carmen. "When Puerto del Carmen was built at the beginning, everything was around Avenida de Las Playas, and it was not necessary, but as it has been growing to the north, many kilometers of streets and a lot of water that falls some days of the year have been created," he remarked.
The mayor of Tías was optimistic after the meeting, especially after they were handed the initiative presented for complying with the requirements demanded in Madrid. "At this moment, the project is in the contracting phase so that the Ministry of the Environment can put the work out to tender and it will be published in the bulletin in the first quarter of 2006. We are talking about a project of more than 17 million euros, which will have to be executed in two or three years," he explained, adding his conviction that "with these 3,000 million of the old currency, we are going to definitively settle the rainwater project of Puerto del Carmen, especially because it has been drafted by technicians who know the area and who know the problems we have gone through."
José Juan Cruz, therefore, said that he is not going to waste another minute in discussions about how to delimit the avenue in the event of spills, as he believes that all the time must be dedicated to the search for the means and sufficient money so that the work can be executed.