Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
throughout the area to sell crops and livestock due to public fear of contaminated
farm products.
In the wake of the mine disaster, public agencies took almost sole charge of clean-
ing, restoration, reforestation, and recovery. These tasks were primarily led by the
Andalusian government via the Department of Environment and Department of Agri-
culture and Fishing, and the Spanish government via the Department of Environ-
ment and the Hydrographic Confederation of the Guadalquivir. The Spanish ad-
ministration and the autonomous administration of Andalusia were tasked with
recovering the area not only ecologically but also socioeconomically, a project ad-
dressed through the expenditure of over 66 million euros for acquisition and expropri-
ation of land and over 22 million euros for restoration. In addition to cleanup opera-
tions and the environmental restoration, the government authority most directly
responsible for this process, the Regional Department of the Environment in Andalu-
sia, proposed that an ecological passage be created to link the Doñana marshlands in
the south to the Sierra Morena's mountains in the north through a “Green Corridor.”
The process of restoration of the Guadiamar's riverbed included an extraordinary
deployment of human, material, and economic capital that marks it as an unprece-
dented milestone in the remediation of an environmental disaster. In the first phase of
the mud's withdrawal the economic investment, overseen by the central and Andalu-
sian governments, was of more than 43 million euros, utilizing almost five hundred
trucks and nine hundred workers. The second phase had an approximate cost of 14.5
million euros. The agile, fast planning and execution of the cleaning set a precedent
in the history of mining accidents, becoming a reference point for future actions. The
first phase of cleaning was initiated eight days after the spill and was completed in just
seven months, during which time seven million cubic meters of contaminated mud
and land were withdrawn. The purification of toxic water was initiated two months
following the spill and was finalized in less than three months. Finally, the second
phase of cleaning (in the extreme north and south of the flooded zone) was prolonged
from the end of 1998 to the year 2000, eliminating 99 percent of the contaminants re-
leased (Garrido 2008). In 2005, this space was declared a “protected landscape,” be-
coming one of the few known cases in the world in which a highly degraded space has
become the object of protection and conservation.
The participatory process carried out as part of the implementation and develop-
ment of the Green Corridor project, in which my colleagues and I were involved as
analysts and facilitating technicians, highlights the issues raised earlier. It is a good ex-
ample of a process of environmental restoration in which the lack of involvement on
the part of the local population undermined the possibilities for conservation and sus-
tained restoration of the territory. The characteristics and conditions of this process
have not fortified the resilience of the space. It has been “restored” from a physical
point of view, but it continues to possess a high level of vulnerability due to the es-
trangement of the population from their local environment. The two-and-a-half-year
delay between the technical cleanup and restoration work (April 1998) and the start of
the participatory process (November 2000) is significant. Not only does it show just
