The uncompleted Emergency Centre for the Orihuela Costa based at La Zenia could be fully running by early 2018, according to Orihuela council’s emergency coordinating councillor, Victor Valverde (pictured). Valverde said that once certain administrative formalities are completed, the tender for the work should be advertised and awarded by next summer, with the completion work said to cost around one point six million euro. Once the tender is handed out, work on the site should only take six months, according to Valverde, with money supplied by the Valencian Government. The log-jam over the centre only started to be broken when the new PSOE-led regional administration took over in the summer of 2015, after five years of inactivity in Valencia.
The unfinished emergency centre was going to house the local police and Guardia Civil, as well as being a base for the fire and ambulances services in addition to the local Civil Protection group, but the contractor went bankrupt just months into the development over six years ago. Over one hundred demonstrators went to the site last December to vent their anger that the project remained stalled.
Back in June, the head of the Valencian emergency and safety agency, José María Ángel, visited the abandoned site at La Zenia, and said that a tender would be advertised in September, with a view to finishing the centre next year. Earlier this year, Orihuela opposition socialist PSOE councillors said that work at La Zenia was going to resume after the readvertising of the tender which would be on a lower budget than the original two-million-euro project. José María Ángel also said in June that he wanted the Emergency Centre to “be a reality as soon as possible” and that the Valencian government had allocated a budget for the work to be done.
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