They warn of the breakage of a phospho-gypsum pool “similar to that of Huelva”

Ría table has alerted this Tuesday about the breakage of a phospho-gypsum pool in Florida, “similar to that of Huelva”, that “Shows that the height stacking system is unsustainable over time”.

For the municipal group, the environmental disaster caused in Florida, which has forced the evacuation of nearby towns due to the risk to the health of the population, “should serve the Spanish authorities to discard the plan proposed by Fertiberia, whose objective is to bury the phospho-gypsum illegally dumped in Huelva ”.

Likewise, the organization warns of “the instability of the land on which more than one hundred million tons of waste have been dumped, which makes stacking at height unsustainable, something that the former director of the expert committee has already warned of José Borrego Flores, director of the Department of Earth Sciences of the Faculty of Experimental Sciences of the University of Huelva ”, recalls the president of the Mesa de la Ría association, Juan Manuel Buendía.

For the municipal spokesperson of this organization, Rafael Gavilán, “the Huelva City Council has in its power to prevent a similar environmental disaster in Huelva, but has regretted that its proposal to reject the Fertiberia plan has been defeated on successive occasions in the municipal plenary session. thanks to the votes of PSOE, PP, Cs and VOX ”. For this councilor, “all these political groups are betraying the citizens who have chosen them, among other issues, to provide a solution to this problem, since they have chosen to side with the economic interest of Fertiberia, condemned by the Justice due to the illegality of the dumping, instead of opting for the environmental recovery of our natural spaces so unjustly destroyed ”.

Mesa de la Ría recalls that it already denounced in April 2019 “the spill of four billion liters of acidic water (in Florida about one thousand million have been spilled), after verifying that the water stored in the phospho-gypsum of Huelva had disappeared, in addition to the appearance of up to five huge sinkholes, through which it would have spilled into the Tinto river basin ”.

In this sense, they also underline that “at the last December meeting of the phospho-gypsum table, the member of the expert committee, Rafael Pérez López, warned that the enormous content of elements such as arsenic and cadmium existing in the waters contained in the ponds turned the entire place into a toxic and dangerous waste dump in application of European regulations, as well as the existence of a continuous dumping of these elements into the estuary ”.

For all this, “from Mesa de la Ría we want to warn that we will continue working, both from the scope of the association and from its political aspect in the City Council, to prevent disasters such as the one that occurred in Florida from occurring in Huelva.”

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