NATIONAL Police and the Guardia Civil’s Seprona environmental unit have begun an investigation into the robbery of diesel fuel from a pipeline running between Cartagena and Alicante and the subsequent contamination of an area close to the Salinas natural park in Santa Pola.
On October 5, technicians working for Compañía Logística de Hidrocarburos (CLH) reported a drop in pressure in the pipeline.

Two days later it was found that somebody had made an illegal connection to the pipeline as it passed through Elche. This connection had failed causing an undisclosed quantity of diesel to leak into the surrounding area. A major clean-up operation is now underway to remove all of the contaminated soil and clean it. A police source said that from the time the leak and the illegal connection were discovered it took CLH a week to file an official complaint which has made finding the culprits that much more difficult to do.

CLH say that it has no way of knowing how much fuel was stolen but admits that the damage done to the surrounding area by the leak far outweighs the value of the lost diesel.

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A SIX-HOUR deluge dropped 200 litres of rain per square metre on Vall d’Ebo, forced Marina Alta councils to put emergency services on alert amid fears of another bout of severe flooding.
The alarm was raised when Vall d’Ebo mayor Rafael Llodrá phoned the mayors of towns that border the River Girona to tell them it had burst its banks and to increase their alert state. Although Vall d’Ebo was not in any danger from the flooding the authorities were forced to close the Vall d’Alcalá road and the CV-700 close to Pego industrial estate.

Beniarbeig mayor Luis Gil said that as soon he received the phone call he put the local police and the town’s civil protection unit on alert but as the evening passed it became clear that the river was stable and the threat of more flooding subsided.

In Gandia low-lying areas were left flooded by the torrential downpours with parks and side roads lying underwater for a number of hours.
Local police closed some roads and were forced to excavate a temporary drainage channel to allow water that had accumulated on the N-332 in Benipeixcar and Real de Gandia to drain off.

The Marina Baja water consortium imposed a limit of 396 litres per second on the amount of water being pumped up from the Algar water pumping station to the Guadalest reservoir this week. A spokesman said that the pumping station is capable of sending 1,100 litres of water per second to Guadalest, but due to strict limitations at this time of the year that had to be cut back to prevent to reservoir from becoming too full.

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