Hundreds of people remember the Zaldibar catastrophe and demand that all responsibilities be purged

In the protest, to which more than fifty Basque groups have joined, the Zaldibar Argitu platform has paid tribute to the two deceased workers, Joaquín Beltrán and Alberto Sololuze, next to the landfill.

Hundreds of people have demonstrated this Sunday in Ermua, on the occasion of the second anniversary of the collapse of the Zaldibar landfill, to demand that they be purged all the “responsibilities” for the catastrophe.

In the protest, to which more than fifty Basque groups have joined, the Zaldibar Argitu platform has paid tribute to the two workers who died on the site next to the landfill and has criticized the management carried out by the Basque Government.

This Sunday marks two years since the collapse of the dump of the company Verter Recycling in Zaldibar that buried Joaquín Beltrán and Alberto Sololuze.

Minutes before the demonstration began, Carlos Alonso, lawyer and spokesman for the San Lorenzo Neighborhood Association (Ermua), the Zaldibar Argitu citizen platform and the Ekologistak Martxan association, denounced that two years after the human tragedy and the environmental catastrophe the three entities claim “responsibilities”.

“Above all we remember the two people who died buried by the avalanche of garbage and debris, but we also demand responsibilities. We do not forget but we look to the future,” he warned.

As he has denounced, there are those responsible for the tragedy, “not only, although they are the first and foremost, the managers of the landfill, Verter Recycling”, but also those who should have “supervised and controlled” the operation of the installation and “they did not”.

“Other companies, engineering companies and consultants collaborated in the surveillance of the landfill that they should have seen and did not see how the facility announced its collapse,” he criticized.

Likewise, he highlighted, “above all”, the responsibility of the Basque Government which, “since 2013, has limited itself to giving authorizations successive campaigns expanding the capacity and type of waste that could be buried in Zaldibar”.

In this sense, he has denounced that, however, the Executive has not exercised “the powers of surveillance and control to which he was bound.”

The criminal proceedings for the event are concluded after the three managers of the Verter Recycling company, owner of the landfill, agreed with the prosecution and the families of the deceased a sentence of six months in prison for the reckless homicide of the two workers.

On the other hand, a second judicial process for alleged environmental crimes remains open, while the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament has requested additional information from the Basque Government about the collapse of the facility.

Political party reactions

For its part, EH Bildu has denounced that when the second anniversary of the collapse of the Zaldibar landfill (Bizkaia) is celebrated, “political responsibilities continue to be unresolved”, to which it has added that it does not accept “false closures”.

The general coordinator of Podemos Euskadi, Pilar Garrido, has criticized the fact that two years after the Zaldibar catastrophe “the Basque Government continues not to assume its responsibility, while Europe investigates its disastrous management”.

The president of the Basque PP, Carlos Iturgaiz, has asked that the investigation of the collapse that occurred in the Zaldibar landfill, where two workers were buried two years ago, continue, because “we need to know what happened, to know the truth.”

February 6, 2020

On February 6, 2020, around 4:00 p.m., the collapse of the dump of Zaldibar, managed by the company Dump Recycling, which buried the two employees who were in the area of ​​the landfill scale at that time; After months of searching, last August the remains of Alberto Sololuze, one of the deceased workers. The search operation continued until mid-May 2021 when the search for the second buried operator was terminated, Joaquin Beltran.

The detachment opened a environmental, health and political crisis in the CAV, in full pre-election campaign. In addition to the seriousness of the landfill collapse, the only case in Europe, was added the discovery that asbestos-containing waste had been stored there, toxic material for which the dump did not have authorization to accept its deposit and the environmental pollution that occurred in the surroundings of the dump, when the gases stored inside the dump were combusted for several days and the dirty water generated by the decomposition of the waste was released. waste.