The disaster that befell the Barcelona neighbourhood of El Carmel on January 25th, 2005 has undergone the same cynical treatment according to many residents who were affected and now face the loss of their homes. That night, 12 families who lived at number 10 Pasaje de Calafell were urgently evacuated from their homes. The reason—their apartment block was suddenly on the verge of collapse. Forty-eight hours later, the garage adjoining it was simply swallowed up by the earth. Tunnelling work under the neighbourhood to extend Line 5 of the metro had unknowingly hit unstable clay, causing a huge chasm 35 metres deep and 30 metres wide, which made everything above and around it unsafe. However, as bad as ensuing events were for all those who lost their homes and were never even allowed to return to collect valuables, it was only the beginning of a nightmare for Carmel’s residents.
As a result of ‘el hundimiento del Carmel’ (‘the sinking of Carmel’), 1,276 residents were evacuated to temporary accommodations, or to live with relatives. Many did not have a chance to rescue their personal belongings and for some of them it would be almost two years before they would be allowed to return. Fifteen thousand others were affected due to the damage the collapse had done to surrounding buildings. Many businesses simply went bankrupt and two schools had to be closed down. On surveying the damage the tunnelling had done to Carmel, then Generalitat president Pasqual Maragall put the disaster on a par with the Prestige oil spill three years earlier. The official investigation pointed fingers at everyone from sloppy constructors to local government, especially the failure to conduct thorough geological surveys. Now though, what started as a terrible man-made disaster has turned into a turf war between constructors and government on one side, and Carmel’s long-suffering residents on the other.
“What’s happened here is tragic and scandalous,” said British resident Fay Shelton, who moved to Carmel just months before the collapse. “The local authorities and construction companies are combining to exploit this tragedy the best they can. They’ve been trying to declare the whole area as ‘unsafe’ for years so that they can raze large parts of Carmel and Horta-Gunairdó to the ground and rebuild it with luxury flats. The 2005 collapse has given them the perfect excuse to accelerate designs they’ve had on this area for a very long time.”
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