up to 13 years of waiting in Lorca and thousands of people still homeless in La Palma

The plan announced this Tuesday by Pedro Sanchez will have a total cost of 10.6 billion euros provide immediate help economic, labor and budgetary with the aim of rebuilding thethe cities most affected by the floods and return to normality as quickly as possible.

But as the popular saying goes, things at the palace are moving slowly. And if not, ask people affected by the volcano The Palm in 2021 or because of the earthquake Lorca in 2011.

The earthquake of Lorcaa magnitude 5.1 earthquake that shook this municipality of Murcia on May 11, 2011, left nine dead, 324 injured, 33,200 families affected and 1,798 houses reduced to ruins. Thirteen years after this 11-M, There are still several families who have not recovered their housing. The Town Hall confirms that there are still families residing in modular houses, next to the district of San Fernandoone of the hardest hit areas.

In Lorca, the mobilization of residents was essential to jointly confront a bureaucracy that had forgotten them and with which they have been fighting incessantly since May 2011.

In fact, some families are now receives the promised help. In July of this year, the Government of Murcia, led by the popular Fernando López Miras, advanced the money that remained to be paid to the families, since the Central Executive had not done so due to the extension of the right . General state budgets.

And already on October 8, the Council of Ministers authorized the transfer of a grant from 500,000 euros to the Region of Murcia to settle the debt of the Administrations towards the people affected by the earthquake who had not yet received all of the aid to which they were entitled.

This money, which arrives 13 years after the tragedy, will be used to settle the unpaid debt and will be used to cover 50% of the expenses related to the repair, rehabilitation and reconstruction of houses affected by the earthquake and which were still in repair. waiting for payment. .

The Palm

Another mirror in which Valencians can look at themselves is The Palm. Three years after it stopped rash of the volcano Old Summitmore than a thousand families on this Canary island have still not found their homes. It is estimated that around 1,600 homes were destroyed by the lava.

Currently, nearly a hundred of them are temporarily housed in container houses which have enabled the Government of the Canary Islands for displaced families. Some containers have already started to rust and sometimes the heat inside is suffocating.

Other affected people still reside in rehabilitated houses, thanks to the help of the Administration. “There are people who live in garages, caravans, on boats… or who are borrowed from relatives’ houses. Where four people lived, today there are 12,” Esteban told the newspaper. , a resident of La Palma. The lava from the volcano buried his house and those of his three children.

In addition to the destroyed houses, the Cumbre Vieja eruption left two ghost towns: Puerto Naos And The light bulb. When the main cone died down, the eruption opened several vents on the coast, from which heavy toxic gases still emanated. Like a sort of Chernobyl, the inhabitants of these two cores will only be able to return to their homes when scientists have certified that the danger of these gas emissions has ceased.

Esteban says that he has not yet seen a euro of compensation offered by the Administration, because the necessary bureaucratic procedures are endless: “Just when I thought I had already sorted out all the papers, now they ask us for the secretary of the Town Hall. to certify that the documentation they provided to us facilitated the land registry is true.”

Hundreds of farmers are also affected: 272 hectares of land were devastated by lava. Where houses and crops once stood, the lava has cooled into a crust of living rock, hard as concrete, in which neither a banana tree nor an avocado can be planted.