This Saturday, November 19, at 12:00 noon, will be held in the municipality of Vandellos-L’Hospitalet de l’Infant (Tarragona) an act that should have taken place a long time ago. The chosen date does not coincide with that of the incident being commemorated. The anniversary also does not fall on a round figure. But that’s the least of it: 33 years and one month after the Vandellòs I nuclear incident, the most serious in the history of Spain, the plant workers, who were the ones who prevented the tragedy, will finally be honored. The Ministry of the Interior has ignored the call. The Generalitat is invited, but it is unknown if someone will attend on its behalf. The only institutional support It will come from the town hall of this coastal town.
The enormous span of time and the disinterest of the central and regional governments are illustrative. It is not that the operators have mobilized to receive recognition. On the contrary. All those consulted reject the term “heroes” and insist that they only did “what they had to do.” They reject any role. But the fact that more than three decades have gone by without any public consideration says a few things about the way in which Spanish society, and its institutions, relate with what happened then.
Reports on the night of October 19, 1989 (the failure of a turbine, the fire that caused, the flooding of the basement and the lack of transparency of the company, called Hifrensa) there have been many. Some very good. What is less known is how those responsible for making the incident, which was considered a level 3 incident, only felt after it was all over. one step below of the nuclear accident, had hardly any consequences.
“And now that?”
This Braulio Rabbit, 75 years old, for example, who was then a maintenance technician and went to Vandellòs I as soon as he saw the black smoke from his home. “When it was all over, it was as if your house had burned down,” he explains. “And now what?” you think. Will we continue working? We went from thinking we were the best, for working there, to feel cursed, as if we had been responsible for having burned down the plant. We deserved this tribute since 1989.”
It’s perceived certain blush when everyone talks about their merits. “The recognition should have taken place when the incident occurred. Do it now, what do you want me to say& mldr; They have not attacked us, nor have they applauded us. We have been anonymous. Neither hell, nor glory, “he explains Angel Ruiz, 75 years old, he supervisor that he was in charge of the atomic facility at 9:39 p.m., when everything went off.
“It also seems very bad to me that there has not been any event like the one that will take place this Saturday, but what are we going to do about it,” he adds Francisco Trujillo, 86 years old, another of the plant’s supervisors. “In another country they would have recognized our work, but here, well, no. We are like that,” he agrees. Juan Jose Colavida, 71 years old, who worked as an assistant, in charge of monitoring the machines at the plant.
many have already passed away
If there is finally a tribute of this type, it is largely thanks to Julio Perez, vice president of the Association of Technicians in Nuclear Safety and Radiological Protection (ASTECSN), former employee of the Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) and one of the specialists who has analyzed the incident in more depth. “To these workers They have not even been thanked. Society owes a debt to them that has never been acknowledged. Before the pandemic, we tried to get the Ministry of the Interior to get involved, but there they referred us to Civil Protection, which in turn asked us to speak with the sub-delegation of the Government. we were going from one place to another. Seeing that there was no interest, and seeing that many of the technicians were already dying of old age, we thought that if we didn’t do the tribute, no one else would,” he explains.
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“What has happened here?” Pérez continues. “That the business he never wanted to acknowledge how close we came to a serious accident. She wanted minimize what had happened, because he feared that the plant would close, as it ended up happening. And if he recognized the merit of the workers, he had to admit that the situation had been very complicated.”
But it was. More than three decades after the accident, those hours continue very present among its protagonists. “The nightmares they have not abandoned me. I have spent many nights dreaming of the power plant,” says Ruiz. Conejo, for his part, began to watch the miniseries Chernobyl a few years ago, about the nuclear accident at the power plant in northern Ukraine, which occurred three years before the Vandellòs incident. I. “In the first chapter, when I saw the workers running through the corridors, it made me a smell that had not felt again since then,” he says. I had to stop watching it.”