11 years later, Lorca is still waiting for all the aid for the earthquake: "I don't know what else they want"

Antonio Bastida's grandson hugged his grandfather the night of the tremor when they were out in the open.

"Don't come back to the house," he begged her.

That was enough so that the man who is 79 years old today did not go to prop up what was left of his home.

He stayed with his family in one of the parks in Lorca (Murcia) that on the night of May 11, 2011 welcomed the thousands of residents expelled from their homes by one of the worst earthquakes in Spain, which left nine dead.

“We looked like zombies, all of us lying on the ground,” he recalls, next to him, his wife, Gertrudis Abellaneda, 72 years old.

The nightmare started that day, but it's not over yet.

His house was declared in ruins, and the Administration granted them the maximum subsidy: 106,423.20 euros.

That was 11 years ago, and they have yet to receive 25% of the promised amount.

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The news of 2011: Two earthquakes shake Lorca

It is not a unique case.

At the beginning of this year there were at least 152 grants already recognized and still pending payment totaling 826,654.3 euros, according to information obtained by EL PAÍS in application of the transparency law.

Of these, 122 were for housing reconstruction, 23 for rental expenses, and 7 for repairs.

Although the Council of Ministers approved in January to deliver 45,000 euros to a total of 13 beneficiaries of rental aid, today dozens of families are still waiting who lost everything and saw how politicians immediately promised solutions that were going to be financed in equal parts by the Central and regional government.

In fact, there are files that have not even been processed yet: from the dependents of Murcia, 61 for reconstruction and 51 for rent, according to information provided by the regional government.

“It seems unbelievable that we are like this after so long.

The administrations throw the ball between them!

It is pure laziness”, laments Gloria Martín, spokesperson for the platform of those affected by the earthquake, which groups 600 families, and councilor of the United Left in the Lorca City Council.

"It's incomprehensible," she complains to herself.

“There are a lot of people who have been hooked, who have been hooked on this for a lot of years.

They are humble, simple families, for whom this represents a significant amount”, she emphasizes.

"And in the case of the files in which it was not possible to justify the cost of the aid, it has meant ruin for many."

The work of the house of Antonio and Gertrudis is finished.

Light wood-look floors, white shelves where memories of a lifetime rest again today, a large L-shaped sofa.

But to finish the process they had to end up asking for a loan.

“I saw the La Palma volcano and thought: 'How long it will take for them to return home and collect everything they are being promised,' reflects Gertrudis.

The bureaucratic nightmare has been full of paperwork.

As the income from the approved subsidy was delayed, they had to request a postponement of the execution period, which forced them to finish the works in two years.

They have kept invoices, transfers, contracts, building permits... All of this has been punctually placed in envelopes that have been sent to the regional Executive to justify the aid that they had approved.

But they are still missing more than 25,000 euros.

The management of aid has been coordinated by a Joint Commission made up of the State, the autonomous community and the City of Lorca.

The Ministry of the Interior details that it has disbursed more than 30 million euros from its budgets, although there are other items executed from other instances of the central Executive.

The regional government, for its part, explains that in this time they have granted 80 million euros distributed in 16,740 grants.

"The process is in the closing phase although there is still some residual issue," says the Murcian Executive in a written response to this newspaper.

Gertrudis and Antonio are two of those residual issues, but many others remain.

In the municipality there are hardly any scars from the earthquake today.

A neighbor points out some cornices that are still somewhat cracked, and another a historic house that was already badly damaged due to lack of maintenance and had to be reinforced with plaster.

Apart from that, all the properties in the La Viña neighborhood, the most affected, look shiny.

A church marks the beginning of the most affected area.

Two buildings fell on top of her and completely destroyed her.

Today it is a modern white building with curvilinear shapes.

“The scars are not on the buildings, they remain on the people,” says Gertrudis with unexpected poetry.

Rescue teams search through the rubble of a building destroyed by the earthquake in Lorca. FRANCISCO BONILLA

Lucía Martínez, 58, is another of those residual issues.

A procedure resolved on paper, but which has not yet been reflected in the family's current account.

Her house was in the neighborhood of La Viña, ground zero of the tremor.

She completely fell apart.

A year after the earthquake, the Administration paid her the aid money, but her personal situation was too devastating to read the fine print: she had to carry out the reconstruction within a year of the concession, or request a postponement.

A few weeks after the earthquake, she and her husband had to take care of their nephew because her sister-in-law died of cancer.

Her husband, a construction worker, who had lost his job with the brick crisis, exhausted access to subsidies in the same period.

All this accumulation of misfortunes caused the depression to fall and the aid money was parked in the account.

In 2017 they received a letter in which they demanded the return of that amount, with interest.

When they had started to get out of the hole and her husband found work, the claim was a blow.

"We didn't know what to do, we didn't understand anything because we didn't even realize what we had signed and they started to garnish part of my husband's salary to collect that supposed debt," says Lucía.

Lucía, her husband and her son were able to settle in her father-in-law's house, which is on the outskirts of Lorca, but during all these years she has continued to live in her neighborhood.

There are her businesses, her bank, her friends and the life she wants to return to one day.

When they were allowed to return to their destroyed home a few weeks after the quake to collect her things, the first thing her husband took was her son's communion photo.

"I was more practical and took important roles," she says with a half smile.

Her memory doesn't often go back to that day when everything fell apart.

“I'm getting cold just thinking about it,” she says, despite the intense sun: the thermometer in the nearby tobacconist's shows 30 degrees.

More than 5,000 wage garnishment processes were initiated, says Gloria Martín, the spokeswoman for the platform of those affected.

In the end, her claims were successful, and the Administration recognized that she did not have to repay the aid or pay interest.

"We had to present all the medical history so that they would agree with us," says the affected.

But the money still hasn't arrived.

"The processing is complex, to which is added the difficulty of the reconstruction and repair works themselves," emphasizes the regional government, which recalls that the autonomous community approved "a regulation to simplify the state bureaucracy that prevented solving some of the helps”.

And remember that with this regulation, a "definitive solution was given to the more than 5,300 beneficiary families of aid to repair their homes."

Domingo Lázaro reviews in his living room all the documentation stored since he began the procedures to receive the aid.ALFONSO DURAN

But some of these solutions are slow in coming.

Domingo Lázaro remembers perfectly what he was doing when everything shook for the first time: “I was watching the Giro d'Italia”.

It was the beginning of the Lorca earthquake, when the earth warned for the first time.

This 74-year-old neighbor went out into the street and saw that part of the plaster had come off from the interior patio, so he went out with the broom and dustpan to clean.

It was at that moment when the second tremor knocked down the interior of his house and thousands of other houses in his municipality.

Her wife was locked up and a police officer had to get her out by kicking down the door.

Lázaro, who had gone out to sweep, was not able to go back in until six years later, when he finished the rehabilitation of his block.

During all that time they lived in a rented apartment, a few blocks from their house.

The commission granted them aid to rent temporary housing.

“At the beginning we were receiving income, with delays, but we were pulling.

But two years ago they stopped coming and here we are, I'm missing 8,000 euros, ”he summarizes.

To finish meeting the expenses, he had to borrow money from a relative.

Domingo couldn't go to see how his block was being pulled down.

"Seeing how they demolish the house in which you were born, it's not pleasant, you know?".

When he retrieved his furniture from the warehouse he had kept it in all this time, many were gnawed by rats or damp.

"We buy new ones, we settle in at home as if we were newlyweds again," he says.

They just need one more income to put the nightmare behind them.

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