If the neighborhood and political opposition to the establishment in the port of Alicante of a plant consisting of six fuel tanks was already notorious, the news that the company XC Business intends to obtain the necessary permits to expand the facility to include twenty tanks comes to reinforce that firm refusal.
It so happens that, in its rejection of the appeals filed against the first request from Portuaria argued that “XC Business 90 SL will only have 14,500 m2 of land on a plot of Pier 19 of the Port of Alicante, currently in the process of transferring use for the storage and distribution of fuel through six (6) tanks.”
That was the commitment that, on November 15, 2018, the General Director of TMS – the land concessionaire company – sent to the Port Authority in which he renounced assigning the use to a second phase: “the concessionaire renounces assigning the use of the Port Public Domain for XC Business 90 SL to develop a 2nd Phase consisting of the expansion through twelve (12) fuel tanks with an estimated capacity of 600,000 m3,” the letter literally says.
Since May 2003, TMS has been the holder of a port land concession made up of three different terminals: the one closest to the city is intended for boarding and disembarking passengers, where the Oran ferry docks; another is intended for container traffic and, finally, the one furthest from the city, is reserved for locating special facilities that would accommodate the traffic of bulk goods, both solid and liquid.
In that same document, the Port Authority rejected the parallel with the CHL warehouses that were removed from the port in the 90s, since those were about 250 meters from the closest homes and the XC Business complex, if any. To be finalized, it will be located at the confluence of piers 19 and 21, “more than 800 meters” from the nearest neighborhood.
However, in a document presented yesterday before the Alicante City Council, the Parque del Mar Neighborhood Association of Alicante explains that, “although the Supreme Court overturned the modification introduced by the Botanic Government in the LOTUP regarding the minimum distance of 1,000 meters of this type of installations with respect to urban centers, this requirement remains in force according to Law 6/2014 on Air Quality of the Generalitat Valenciana.”
For this reason, the neighborhood entity requests “that the license be denied to the project to install macro fuel tanks in the urban port of Alicante, both for the first phase and for the subsequent phases requested, under the provisions of the tenth additional provision of “Law 6/2014 on Air Quality of the Generalitat Valenciana, set out in the previous section, as well as other safety or environmental circumstances that could affect an installation of such magnitude.”
This week, the spokesperson for the Municipal Socialist Group, Ana Barceló, has requested both the Alicante Port Authority and the Provincial Firefighters Consortium to provide a comprehensive copy of the port’s security plan. The reason: “We want to know if this document contemplates the measures that must be implemented in the port area in the hypothetical case that macro fuel tanks end up being authorized.”
In his opinion, “the fuel tanks that are planned are very close to the urban center and, therefore, they would have to have all the guarantees to protect citizens. From this opposition group we position ourselves absolutely against these huge containers being located in the port of Alicante, and we believe that both the City Council and the Generalitat Valenciana have to go one step further to stop them,” said the spokesperson.
Barceló demands both the Consell chaired by Carlos Mazón and the government headed by Luis Barcala to carry out joint actions and, if necessary, to enter into negotiations with the company interested in this facility to ensure that it abandons this macro-project. All this while the pending case is being settled in court.
