With so much illegal building work still being carried out all over the province of Malaga, despite all efforts by the authorities to stop it, the Environment Protection Prosecutors Office has decided to take to the air in search of illegal sites. On Wednesday of last week, the first Guardia Civil helicopter flight with a representative of this office on board took off to spend the morning photographing illegal building sites all over the province of Malaga.
According to information received by this newspaper, a public prosecutor attached to the Environmental Protection Office flew over various parts of the province in the company of two members of Seprona, the Nature Protection service of the Guardia Civil.
This was a pioneering flight in Malaga province, given that, to date, no public prosecutors have accompanied the Guardia Civil in their vigilance flights. The idea is that a complete survey be made of the current state of building all over the Costa del Sol, checking the results against building permits already granted.
Photographs and videos
The helicopter was in the air for most of Wednesday morning of last week, and although it covered a large part of the province of Malaga, it concentrated on areas around the La Viñuela reservoir and different municipalities in the Axarquía.
The public prosecutor and the Guardia Civil members took more than 200 aerial photographs and made a number of video recordings of the areas they flew over, all of construction sites and buildings that may, when checked, turn out to be illegal.
This photographic report of the province of Malaga will be used to provide proof that certain building work being carried out in the province is illegal. The images are converted into what the Guardia Civil call ‘digital ortophotos,’ which is a process by which the photographs are placed over recent urban planning drawings to check that the constructions photographed conform with the official plans. The task of the Guardia Civil is to seek out possible illegal constructions and investigate their status, while the task of the public prosecutor is to bring the wrong-doers to court.
According to the same sources, this first flight by helicopter is the beginning of a series of joint actions by the Guardia Civil and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Malaga aimed at diagnosing the urban planning situation in the province. The Seprona police have, in fact, been photographing parts of the Malaga coastline and the Sierra de las Nieves for some time, and over coming weeks plan to fly over the Los Alcornocales and Genal Valley regions.
Fire risk
The Public Prosecutor’s office is attempting, not only to uncover illegal building sites, but also to detect illegal tip-heads, forestry clearage and areas in danger of forest fire.
The aerial patrol that set out last week ended its work at one in the afternoon, and the Environmental Protection prosecutor took away all the photographs and video recordings made by the Guardia Civil to have them analysed by experts later.
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