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Spain Public Safety and Environmental Problems
The reform and improvement of the country's food
regulations
and inspection procedures were long overdue. In 1981 Spain
experienced a major public health disaster, a "toxic
syndrome"
still unexplained, but believed to be connected with the
consumption of rapeseed oil intended for industrial use,
but
marketed by door-to-door salesmen as olive oil. More than
300
people died from this substance, and hundreds more were
permanently disabled.
The rapeseed tragedy was only one of a number of
man-made or
man-aggravated disasters that Spain has experienced since
it
crossed the threshold into industrial society. Airplane
crashes,
train derailments, bus collisions, hotel fires, gas
explosions--these and other tragedies were nearly
commonplace in
Spain. Far more people died in train accidents in Spain,
for
example, than in any other country in Europe. Spain
suffered
these disasters largely because of a combination of the
advanced
technology of an industrializing and urbanizing society,
low
standards of professional competence and private sector
morality
(themselves the product of rapid growth), and the state's
unwillingness or inability to step in to regulate this
increasingly sophisticated and complex society. Two
problems of
special importance can be cited here: public health and
environmental contamination.
As the rapeseed tragedy illustrates, one of the chief
problems in the public health field had to do with food
and drink
inspection and regulation. Although food containers and
additives
were analyzed by government chemists, the food and drink
themselves were not tested before being put on sale. One
report
on the subject in the mid-1980s estimated that, in the
whole of
Spain, there were fewer than 1,000 people working
full-time to
check the quality of the food and drink in the 225,000
places
where they were manufactured, distributed, sold, and
consumed.
Another check of the 3,000 restaurants, bars, and hotels
in
Madrid found that 35 percent of the wine, 41 percent of
the
spirits, and 75 percent of the milk and ice were unfit for
human
consumption. Rapid and uncontrolled industrialization and
urbanization had left a legacy of air, water, and noise
pollution
that would take a major government effort many years to
correct.
The rivers flowing through Spain's major cities, such as
Madrid
or Bilbao, were little more than open sewers. One survey
of
Bilbao's Rio Nervion showed that 385 factories dumped
their
untreated effluents into it, and that the oxygen content
was only
5 percent compared with the 60 percent, needed to sustain
fish.
In Madrid, air pollution was a major problem during the
late
1970s and the early 1980s, when the suspended particle
count
reached an average of more than 200 micrograms per cubic
meter of
air, compared with the government's recommended maximum
level of
80. Bilbao's atmospheric carbon dioxide level was the
highest of
all the cities in Western Europe. Air pollution was a
problem,
due to the heavy automobile traffic (in the late 1970s
only seven
countries in the world had more registered passenger cars
than
Spain), oil-fired space heating, and heavy industry.
Although there had been significant improvement in
environmental protection in such large cities as Bilbao
and
Madrid in the late 1980s, the mid-sized industrial cities
around
the country were still experiencing rising populations and
pollution at alarming rates. According to a 1987 study by
the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD),
Spain was one of Europe's noisiest countries, principally
because
there were no regulations covering industrial or
automobile noise
levels. In late 1987, the Ministry of Public Works and
City
Planning finally drafted several government decrees that,
for the
first time, set maximum noise levels for industrial and
construction machinery, motorcycles, and automobiles, and
established new regulations in building codes that would
require
soundproofing for residences, hospitals, schools, and
cultural
centers. A survey of 226 firms in Madrid showed that 60
percent
of their 165,000 employees were working in noise higher
than
government-approved limits. In 1988 a government report
revealed
that Spanish industry was producing 1,700,000 tons of
toxic waste
material each year, of which only 240,000 tons could be
disposed
of by burning. When the international agency, the Oslo
Convention, denied Spain the right to dump some of these
wastes
in the North Sea, the government had to store thousands of
tons
of highly toxic chemicals in warehouses along the coast of
the
Bay of Biscay because there was no way that they could be
released into the environment safely.
Data as of December 1988
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