The Minister of Water of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, Domingo Cejas (Coalición Canaria), intervened this Wednesday morning on Radio Lanzarote-Onda Cero to talk about the seizure of the integral water cycle, which as of Tuesday passed into public hands through the Water Consortium, after being taken from Canal Gestión Lanzarote for "serious breaches".
Cejas pointed out that he now carries "much more responsibility" on his shoulders, having to assume a service that accumulates more than 55% of losses in the network, with daily outages and deficiencies in the desalination plants and in the sewage treatment plants.
Thus, the minister of the Cabildo indicated that although the attitude of the representatives of Canal Gestión Lanzarote was collaborative at the beginning, "as the hours went by, it became more complicated". In fact, the manager of Canal Gestión Lanzarote, David González, disagreed with the seizure of the service and recorded it in the minutes.
During his radio intervention, the minister indicated that the Water Consortium has fully assumed the staff of Canal Gestión Lanzarote, a total of 204 workers, except for the director of Canal Gestión, who was dismissed.
Despite this progress, the Cabildo de Lanzarote anticipates that the situation will end up being resolved in the courts. Already on Tuesday, the meeting between representatives of the Canal Isabel II subsidiary and the delegation sent by the Cabildo de Lanzarote extended for four hours due to these disagreements.
Of the total staff, around 30% are on sick leave for medical reasons, some linked to stress or anxiety. "What we intend here is for people to be, as they should be, happy in their jobs," said Cejas, who will focus efforts on recovering the staff on sick leave.
During his intervention on the morning show Buenos días, Lanzarote, the person who will be in charge of this new stage of the integral water cycle explained that they are working to understand how the plant's management works. "There are impressive infrastructures in the plant and now what is needed is to get it up and running," Cejas continued.
The cutoff of a breakdown management system
The transfer of tools has occurred with some problems. Cejas explained that Canal Gestión Lanzarote has prevented the Water Consortium personnel from accessing the SAC system, the tool in which the company had stored incident management and which allowed personnel to know how to operate.
"We also foresaw some of those things," he assured and added that they will investigate "in what situation they have cut that off, but we continue to operate." "The question is, man, is that going to slow down our service? No. Is it going to slow us down? Yes."
The head of the island's Water department defended that "there are issues that cannot be resolved overnight," but that there is already a very big advantage, which is the change" in management.
"We have several fronts open, this does not end here, we have to mark our roadmap, focused on improving the integral water cycle and, on the more legal side, to defend the economic resources of this island," Cejas stated.
One of the first fronts to tackle is presenting a settlement proposal within three months.
In addition, the counselor explained that they must continue improving infrastructure, "with the Consortium's own financing," create a leak detection team, and sectorize water control.
Meanwhile, the materials to completely repair the island's main desalination plant, Lanzarote V, will not arrive from Brazil for several months, and the installation of membranes to repair part of the facilities will have to wait until there is sufficient production.
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