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| Sosa wants IGME scientists to set guidelines for Lorca's policy makers to mitigate the effects of soil subsidence in the Guadalent�n basin | Pedro Sosa, Municipal Spokesperson for Izquierda Unida, will defend a motion in the next Municipal Plenary Assembly regarding the severe implications of the phenomenon of subsidence in Lorca and the need to put this issue on the political agenda Local policy to adopt the necessary public policies that tend to minimize its effects.

In the first days of January 2021, says Sosa, various media outlets, including national newspapers, included in their editions a piece of news of a scientific nature of enormous interest and relief for the municipality of Lorca: Spanish scientists from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) have worked and designed a world map of subsidence due to the extraction of groundwater, and, As we already suspected, Lorca and the Guadalent�n Basin appeared in this study as the areas of the entire European continent where this phenomenon of subsidence is most markedly recorded.

The extraction of groundwater is sinking the soil of Lorca at a rate of 10 centimeters per year.

This is news that brought about an article that appeared in the first issue of 2021 of the prestigious publication "SCIENCE", which included that study and where, among other things relevant to Lorca, states that "subsidence permanently reduces the storage capacity of the aquifer system, causes fissures in the land, damages buildings and civil infrastructure and increases the susceptibility and risk of flooding�" Sosa affirms in his motion that this phenomenon is not new, nor is it strange to our land.

We know that the continued exploitation of groundwater in the city of Murcia, in the first years of the nineties of the last century, caused severe subsidence of the soil in the metropolitan area of that city, generating large and millionaire damage to homes and infrastructures in the capital of the Region.

In defense of his political initiative, the mayor of IU affirms that "our municipality has a wide, extensive and long relationship in historical time with various natural phenomena (mainly earthquakes and floods) in which the Human action has been able to contribute to multiply their devastating effects "and that, therefore," we should not increase this list by turning our backs on the warnings of scientists on the subject that concerns us today.

Sosa that it is necessary to take political advantage of the inertia generated as a result of the publication of the IGME article in the journal "Science", and to introduce now, without waiting for a new wake-up call, in the local and regional political agenda on this matter.

For this, the IU councilor proposes that the Lorca City Council formally address the IGME (its territorial center in Murcia and the authors of the study referred to in the body of the motion), requesting their presence in Lorca for the purpose of expand (both to the general public, and, particularly, to the institutional, political, social and economic actors of Lorca) the information on the phenomenon of subsidence in Lorca, its evolution ½n and its scope.

In this communication, experts will also be urged to advance, as far as possible, the measures that from a scientific point of view would be advisable to minimize, attenuate or reduce the effects of the subsidence.

Sosa explains that the main doubts that the phenomenon of subsidence generates are the following: 1) Timeliness, technical feasibility and convenience of recharging aquifers, with all the considerations that this entails.

2) Need to maximize control of the extraction of water in the aquifer and the persecution of illegal irrigation.

3) Convenience of resizing water extraction based on the danger of subsidence (for homes and infrastructures) by specific areas, if that is possible.

4) And impact that subsidence should have on the Spatial Planning regulations that affect Lorca and its basin; in the regulations for the construction of municipal planning; in urban plans in general; in the urban classification of soils; in strategic planning; in infrastructure works plans, etc.

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Source: IU-verdes Lorca