I don’t know if you remember what was called, in the summer of 2017, the microalgae (cyanobacteria) crisis, which incidentally never led to the closure of 16 beaches in Tenerife. From certain political parties and leaders to certain media, the regional government and the island council were directly and explicitly accused of perversely hiding the “obvious” relationship between the illegal dumping into the sea and the smelly algae that appeared along the coast. Not even after the publication of reports from the University of La Laguna that denied that fanciful relationship did the screaming and quasi-apocalyptic posturing cease. The microalgae disappeared, but now something similar happens with fuel. What is illegally dumped in Tenerife and throughout the Canary Islands through authorized or not underwater outfalls – more than 120 million liters per day – is mostly shit, and you excuse the vulgarism, if you remember the very low economic weight it has on the islands the industrial sector and the non-existence of mining extractions. For the rest, in this last year and a half more than nine million tourists have not been able or willing to travel to the Canary Islands, so it is very likely that the discharges emitted since the sudden appearance of the coronavirus have been much lower.
The most widespread thesis among the Canarian Government is that this piche – which nowhere have extensive spots appeared on the surface of the sea – does not originate in submarine outfalls, but rather in ships that save a dough by shrinking dirty water, the grease and fuel from its bilges on the high seas. In the worst case scenario, they could go twelve miles away, the limit of Canarian waters, but of course they hardly ever take so much trouble. If this practice takes place in long periods of chicha calm –which is not the usual state of CD Tenerife, but rather a prolonged situation without winds– it is not strange that spots of piche end up dirtying numerous points of the coast. What amazes me, honestly, is the same as what happened with microalgae: I remember perfectly twenty, thirty and forty years ago some half-strewn beaches, small oily spots in others, quiet dirty from hydrocarbons. It used to happen in September and October, at the end of the summer, and that’s why it made us even more mad. Of course, this hypothesis is not an alibi to maintain the current situation of illegal dumping, but it should be specified – the authorities are taking time to do so – so that the heralds of an instantaneous ecological catastrophe do not continue to torment us. Of course, if Grande Marlaska and Pestana are unperturbed by the hundreds of dead migrants en route to the Canary Islands, how is a piche treasury going to bother them?
