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ARCHIVED - 49 agriculturalists to be investigated individually for illegal use of water relating to Mar Menor deterioration
Judge rules that 49 agriculturalists related to Mar Menor deterioration should be investigated individually
The farming concerns are suspected of illegally extracting and treating water from the Campo de Cartagena aquifer
Ángel Garrote, the investigating judge in the “Topillo” case (which concerns the illegal use and treatment of water from the aquifer beneath the Campo de Cartagena for irrigation farming), has issued an order for the cases of 49 agricultural concerns to be dealt with individually rather than as part of a collective investigation brought by the Guardia Civíl.
The evidence prepared by the Guardia Civíl and gathered after an extensive investigation into the illegal drilling of wells, construction of illicit desalination plants, illegal use of water and the contamination of both the water aquifer below the Campo de Cartagena and the Mar Menor via agricultural chemicals relates to more than 200 agricultural concerns and has taken three years to compile.
The judge has made the decision to split off the cases which are believed to warrant an individual criminal investigation, while at the same time deeming the investigations into 14 more companies closed after having found insufficient incriminating evidence.
The investigations are important not only because they concern the possible illegal use of water from the aquifer, but because the treatment of water extracted results in the creation of waste water which, when it eventually makes its way to the Mar Menor, has contributed over the last 50 years or so to the deterioration of the marine environment in the lagoon.
It is this harmful runoff which triggered the start of the investigation three years ago, after the episode of eutrophication which turned the water of the Mar Menor a greenish colour in 2016 but before the massive “gota fría” storm of September 2019, when floodwater from the Campo de Cartagena led to millions of dead fish being washed ashore after oxygen levels in the water dropped drastically.
One of the judicial decrees issued by Judge Garrote this week establishes five criteria by which it is decided whether a company may have been treating water from the aquifer: the possession of one or more wells or boreholes, the possession of one or more desalination plants, the acquisition of chemical substances used in treating water of this kind (such as de-scaling agents), the existence of a “water deficit” (i.e. more crops than could be irrigated by legally sourced water) and, in some cases, the extraction of water which would be unusable for irrigation without extracting nitrates first.
In many cases, the highly saline brackish waste generated as a by-product of the desalination process, was tipped back down into the aquifer or poured into waste channels which fed into the Mar Menor.
The 49 companies under investigation are believed by the judge to have been responsible for the extraction of 26.5 million cubic metres of water from the aquifer and the creation of 6.6 million cubic metres of brackish wastewater, and the task now is to determine whether either individually or collectively they can be said to have caused a serious risk to air, water and soil quality, to flora and fauna or to the eco-system of the Mar Menor. Experts are also to be asked to determine whether there was any resultant risk to public health as well as noting cases in which the by-products of water treatment were harmless or irrelevant.