Council calls neighbour’s bluff over flooding problems
PILAR de la Horadada council has asked its neighbouring town hall in San Pedro del Pinatar to prove that buildings it claims are responsible for incessant flooding problems every time it rains in the coastal village of El Mojón were properly authorised.
El Mojón spans both municipalities on the border between the Valencia and Murcia regions but has been inundated 17 times in the last seven months, residents complained last week.
Pilar council suspects that work carried out on 149 buildings and farmland over the last 30 years has altered or directly affects how surface run-off water ends up filling the streets of the village with mud and cutting off the RM-F33 road to San Pedro.
Now it is demanding to see whether these cases were properly supervised and inspected by San Pedro town hall and Murcia regional government.
Both councils are already at odds over the solution to the flooding proposed by the national government’s Segura river and water authority (CHS), which would involve diverting floodwater into the urban watercourse in Pilar, which mayor José María Pérez has noted was ‘developed and paid for by residents’.
CHS reports acknowledge that ‘urban development modifications made in recent years have contributed to block the basin’s traditional outlets to the sea’.
It does not refer to the question of whether another motivation may be to divert this run-off loaded with fertilisers from the ecologically sensitive wetlands of the Salinas de San Pedro natural park into the Mediterranean instead.
Political parties in Pilar have already unanimously asked the CHS to modify its plans and consider a cheaper alternative further inland along the border at Lo Romero.
Meanwhile the frustrated residents have set up their own protest group, Stop Inundaciones El Mojón, to pressure the authorities into finding a solution.