Rogelia Gómez, president of the association of neighbors affected by toxic substances of Coria del Río (Seville), went early this Thursday to the Directorate of the Institute of Forensic Medicine (IML) of Seville to check whether a forensic expert has been assigned capable of evaluating the illnesses of the inhabitants of the Guadalquivir neighborhood who have been exposed to high levels of polluting gases for two decades. “They told us they haven’t appointed anyone yet,” he explains. This finding is surprising, since on October 29 the judge investigating the case issued an order in which he invited this body dependent on the Council to inform it of the “status of the reports relating to the evaluation of the possible injuries suffered” and asked that they be finalized and sent “as soon as possible”, as EL PAÍS has learned. “How can we ask for reports if we don’t have a doctor yet? We’ll have to ask for a doctor first, right?” Gómez asks desperately.
After seven years, the investigative phase investigating the origin of the toxins, limited to the floors of a petrol station, is about to end, according to the report of the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office incorporated into the case earlier this year. The head of the Civil and Investigative Section of the Court of Coria has yet to integrate the medical reports into the case, reports that the neighbors have been asking for in court for at least a year, as the neighbors’ lawyer, Sara Domínguez, recalled. It is now that the judge puts pressure on the IML, but the fact is that since the complaint was filed in 2018, no forensic expert has analyzed any neighbors.
“They don’t want to know anything about us”, complains Gómez, not only for this latest “nonsense”, but also for the apathy of the administrations – from the Municipality of Coria to the Ministries of Health, Environment and Parliament – in remedying the pollution problem of their neighborhood, already documented by Seprona, the National Institute of Toxicology, the Andalusian Environment Agency and the Environment Prosecutor’s Office. In all of them it is confirmed that their 4,000 residents have been exposed to high levels – which in some cases exceed up to 100 times the regulatory reference limits – of hydrocarbons such as toluene, benzenes and xylenes, both in the soil and in groundwater. They can cause “headache, nausea, dizziness, disorientation, confusion and restlessness, leukemia, loss of consciousness, respiratory depression, respiratory irritation, palpitations, dizziness…”, according to a letter from the Environment Prosecutor’s Office, diseases from which residents suffer.
The request that the IML assess the state of health is a recurring complaint from neighbors. Just on October 27, the association held a meeting with the heads of the Health and Environment departments of Seville in which it was decided to develop a protocol that would allow health workers to attribute the development of ailments suffered by residents, most of which are chronic, to contact with these toxic hydrocarbons. In Spain there is no guide that allows doctors to make this connection and the Andalusian government has committed to drawing up this protocol at the Virgen del Rocío Hospital, essential so that those affected can request the corresponding compensation.
In that meeting, the need to coordinate the action of the hospital center with the forensic doctor designated for the preparation of the reports was also highlighted and, therefore, the association sent a letter to the judge asking the IML to coordinate with the Virgen del Rocío “so that its doctors participate in the preparation of the medical-legal reports, taking into account their particular technical-scientific complexity and the need to guarantee a rigorous and multidisciplinary evaluation of the possible effects deriving from exposure to substances toxic”, as specified in the text in which it is specified this newspaper had access. A complicated request to implement given that, as Gómez warns, there is still no doctor in charge of evaluating them: “We are tied hand and foot.”
It’s not the only request they made to the judge. The neighbors asked to investigate whether the origin of the toxic substances, in addition to the petrol station, could be found in other wells in the nearby industrial warehouses. Once the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office narrowed its focus to the pump, it made more sense for the plaintiffs to be able to include in the investigation the provincial water management company, Aljarafesa, which had acknowledged that one of its collectors had cracks. “By excluding other sources of contamination, it becomes more evident that Aljarafesa is considered responsible, since these cracks allowed the entry of hydrocarbons into the sanitation network,” indicates the lawyer, who is also carrying out the entire investigation asking for the involvement of this entity.
The instructions proceed, but the obstacles are overcome so that the residents of the neighborhood can do justice and have peace of mind, to the extent that that sentence implies: both of them stop inhaling toxic gases, which 20 years later they continue to endure, because the cleaning work of the company that owns the petrol station was not carried out correctly – in fact the City Council has just asked them to present a new decontamination project -; how to close two decades of judicial and administrative attacks.
