Abandonment, apathy, neglect and shame are just a few of the comments that residents of Orihuela Costa are making about the management by the City Council of the refuse collection service, as containers across the whole region continue to overflow.
Although a fairly common complaint, in addition illegal dumping of pruning and equipment, the collection has now been reduced because the service has only two collection trucks for the entire coastline, according to sources and of the 18 trucks that the municipality for collecting general waste, five are damaged and two others have problems.
The same sources indicate that there is no way of getting them repaired, since the contract for vehicle repair and maintenance services expired in February. Until now it has continued to work until the credit allocated to that service has been exhausted, but now, the Councillor for Street Cleaning and Urban Solid Waste, Guillermo Cánovas (PSOE), has said that the local administration is in the process of negotiating a new contract, although he is unable to specify deadlines.
Neighbourhood Associations are calling it, “a serious problem of public hygiene and health”, adding that the broken trucks is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, which translates into “a serious and irresponsible lack of action by the people who run this council”.
“It is a time bomb that has been ticking away for the last two government terms and very soon it will explode”, because “the situation is seriously worsening every day”, according to sources from the Cabo Roig and Lomas Neighborhood Association, who point out that ” the current government team is doing very badly, but it is also a situation they have inherited from the previous administration”.
They state that “Orihuela Costa has been totally abandoned to its fate in street cleaning, rubbish collection, garden maintenance and all kinds of other necessary infrastructure” to the point of concluding that the coalition government of the PSOE and Ciudadanos should “provide explanations and apologise for forcing residents to live in such a disgraceful way”.
Image: AVCRL
