2023-07-03 00:22:03
MADRID
Updated Monday, July 3, 2023 – 00:22
Internal bodies block initiatives of the Technical General Secretariat and warn that the security of infrastructures is at risk
Works of the Ministry of Transport on the AVE line Barcelona MadridELENA RAMÓN
The Ministry of Transport has clashed with its own engineers and the main associations and professionals in Spain for trying to impose construction regulations that avoid transposing European codes and, they say, put the safety of the works at risk.
Transportes is the main contractor for public works in the State, with infrastructure construction and maintenance projects such as roads, railways, viaducts, dams, ports…On June 16, the Technical General Secretariat, the nucleus on which the minister and her Undersecretary of Transport rely for decision-making and from which reports, studies and procedures of the ministry emanate, convened commissions of experts in concrete and steel to approve a new regulation on the use of these materials in public works. In these commissions, experts from the ministry itself in railway safety or highways and housing appear as assistants, as well as members of the ministries of Labor and Ecological Transition, among others.
The result was that the proposal of the trusted body of Minister Sánchez received an unprecedented and resounding rejection by those summoned, which alert that “the regulations currently in force in Spain are clearly outdated and insufficient and denounce the closure of the Ministry that refuses to adopt the European codes”. In other words, the technical managers for infrastructure security themselves oppose the regulations that the ministry is trying to push forward.
As a consequence, 16 professional associations and federations of engineers from all disciplines representing thousands of engineers and technicians, companies, professors and architects have signed and sent to the Ministry of Transport and Moncloa a manifesto in which they demand that they be adopted at once by all the Eurocodes – design standards that have been used for more than a decade in the vast majority of European countries – which guarantee the highest levels of safety in construction and against earthquakes.
In relation to the risk that a seismic movement can pose to the infrastructures, the ministry has managed to carry out new safety regulations that according to the engineers Nor do they conform to the codes in force in the rest of the countries of the European Union. If the already imminent electoral calendar does not prevent it, the norm could still be approved.
The Association of Civil Engineers indicates that the reason for the hard core of the ministry to reject the European regulations and confront the profession is “the legal infeasibility of the simple direct reference to the Eurocodes in a Spanish regulation”. However, sources from the ministry itself read the refusal as “the tool of the Technical General Secretariat to maintain hegemony over the profession”. The body has resisted the demands of professionals and companies in the sector during the mandate of three ministers: Íñigo de la Serna, José Luis Ábalos and, now, Raquel Sánchez.
Be that as it may, one of the oldest and most relevant institutions of the profession in Spain has already publicly expressed “the great concern” existing in the profession due to the lack of technical coherence of the draft regulations, approved “without scientific criteria, without endorsements without unanimity “and” with the consequent risks to the safety of buildings and infrastructures and, most importantly, for people’s safety in the event of an earthquake.”
Earthquakes are rare in Spain, although not improbable, as the case of Lorca (Murcia) in May 2011. With an intensity of 5.1 points on the Richter scale -considered moderate- 80% of the houses were damaged and more than 1,000 had to be demolished while another 70 buildings built with current standards suffered serious damage and collapsed, according to the engineers.
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