Residents from across the Orihuela Costa continue to denounce their abandonment by the Orihuela municipal council, the dirt and the filth as well as the overflowing dustbins and the lack of cleaning in the streets, the parks and the green areas.
Plastic bags and bottles, cardboard and all kinds of organic waste are allowed to coexist in an uncontrolled manner alongside the Orihuela Costa residents, with dustbins regularly overflowing onto the streets where it often remains for many hours, or even days, before it is collected and disposed of by Urban waste.
Add the problems of the stinking waste to the problem of the invasion of weeds and scrub on roads and pavements, making some sections of pathway impassable across the entire area, on both sides of the N332.
And all this is happening during the high tourist season which will result in many thousands of holidaymakers seeing the region, its government, services and its councillors, in the very worst possible light.
The abundance of rubbish is most evident in the areas across from the beaches, in the roads and residential urbanisations located on the inland side of the N-332 road.
Urbanizations such as La Regia, Lomas de Cabo Roig, Las Filipinas, Villamartín, Aguamarina and La Florida are just some of those that most visibly show examples of dirt the denounced by residents, who suffer on a daily basis the consequences of having their containers full of garbage throughout the day, along with the bad odours, mountains of equipment, green waste and the remains of felled bushes, trees and shrubs. These are just a few of the items and materials that “decorate” the streets of the Oriolan coastline.
This calamitous situation is repeated across yet another summer and presents an image of negligence that is far from that appropriate for a tourist area and where far more many residents reside during the summer months.
But simple things like the vast increase in the number of residents and the services that are require to support the additional influx of people seem to have escaped the notice of Dámaso Aparicio, the councillor responsible for the areas of Transparency, Environment, and Road Cleaning. Having been in post for over three years, during which period the situation has been much the same as now, it seems that the councillor just doesn’t have the wherewithal or the ability to handle such an important post as he has let the Orihuela Costa down time and time again.
The Federation of Associations of Orihuela Costa (FAOC), say that they had exactly the same problem last year, and the year before. The dates were exactly the same as was the situation and “there has been no solution or indeed any interest in our situation, despite the fact that we continue to demand more road cleaning and associated services,” says spokesman Liam Kiley.
Similarly neither do the local shopping centres, places of leisure and restoration on the Oriolan coast escape from this bad image, like the congested environment of La Zenia, whose environment is full of discarded objects and abundance of brushwood.
And municipal plots share exactly the same problems, an example of which the parking area that is linked to Zenia Boulevard.
“The dirt that we see all around us today has been in exactly the same place for months without anyone coming to remove it and the residents are absolutely helpless to do anything at all about it as the days pass by and the situation just gets worse. We believe that there is a lack of resources including machinery, containers, trucks, as well as employees and willingness and the management is appalling”, says Tomás Moreno, also of FAOC.
To this situation of abandonment by the council is added the failure to provide an ecopark for the use of residents, a facility that FAOC has been demanding for eight years and one that would help enormously to alleviate the problem.
However the deplorable situation painted by the residents of the Orihuela Costa is not fully shared by the Council, which states that it is making more investment than ever, according to Councillor Aparicio, who recognises the lack of trucks and containers that are dedicated to the Oriolana coast, where there are 22,000 people registered, but in summer which increases to more than 200,000.
The councillor says that next September a batch of some 300 containers and two more trucks are expected to be allocated to meet the cleaning needs of Orihuela Costa, but he also states that “the commitment and collaboration of residents is also necessary if the situation is to improve.”
Aparicio points out that “people must respect the schedules, deposit the rubbish where it belongs and pre-warn when they are going to throw furniture or garden waste, so that the City Council can collect it in a timely manner”.
