Dropping Bombs On Spain: The Palomares incident

Last year when I was researching old copies of the "Majorca Daily Bulletin" in order to write a history of the paper's news over its 50 years, I came across a news item for 18 January, 1966. It was news that I hadn't gone looking for. It was not news that had registered with me. I'll excuse myself on the basis of having been too young at the time to have noticed

Under the heading "US Jets Collide Over Spain", the news item read thus: "Two giant US Air Force jets collided over Spain today and seven crewmen were feared dead. The planes, a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker, had been due to rendezvous so that the bomber could be refuelled in the air - a delicate operation with the planes flying only yards apart. The burned wreckage of both planes was found about 65 miles north-east of the Mediterranean port of Almeria. Three bodies were found. Four men are missing."

The news report goes on to say that "fishermen raced to their boats when they saw parachutes dropping into the sea". It says that the bomber was en route to an "eastern country" (unspecified) and that the tanker had taken off from an air base near Seville. Other than this, there is nothing of real note in the report.

It is what the report didn't say which is important. The B-52 was carrying four hydrogen bombs. One of them ended up at the bottom of the sea. Two of them exploded. The explosion was a conventional one in that it quite obviously didn't amount to what the bombs were capable of; they were carrying 75 times the force that had been dropped on Japan. But the explosion did, nevertheless, scatter radioactive material.

Palomares is a small town of 1700 people in the Almeria province. This is a part of Spain which is heavily dependent upon tourism. Palomares enjoys some of the rewards of this industry but not as many as it might do. Palomares was the town that was most affected by the radioactive plutonium that was scattered. Parts of it remain sealed off to this day because of the contaminated land.

The incident sparked off an emergency operation that was initially dealt with by Spanish services. Unused to the technology and not prepared for taking the necessary precautions, many members of the emergency services, primarily from the Guardia Civil, suffered from exposure to radiation. Over 500 compensation claims were eventually settled by the US Government. The Americans have paid, so it is believed, at least two billion dollars for compensation to individuals, for land that was affected and for the clean-up operation. Yet the matter has still not been definitively resolved.

At the meeting in Washington between Barack Obama and Mariano Rajoy this week, Palomares was not on the agenda. The fact that, certainly for the news media in Almeria, it wasn't on the agenda shows how much the 1966 incident is still very much alive. Though Obama didn't discuss the matter, Hillary Clinton has suggested that she wants it sorted out once and for all, and this means the removal of the remaining contaminated land.

Extraordinary though it is that it has taken nearly 50 years to bring some closure to the incident, it is also extraordinary how it came to be known about. One imagines of course that it would have become known about eventually, but the Spanish and the Americans, for differing reasons, sought to keep the lid on the bombs. The reports of the collision were as in "The Bulletin", though even this went further than had been originally intended by the media manipulators. The admission that a B-52 had been involved had originally been excluded from news feeds.

The Spanish had very good reasons not to let the world know what had happened. Tourism was one and another was public opinion in Spain. Franco and his government may not typically have cared what the public thought, but it didn't want the people knowing that the Americans were flying in Spanish airspace with nuclear weapons and that they were dropping them on Spanish soil, if only by accident and if only because safety devices had prevented a thermo-nuclear explosion.

The two governments might have got away with it had it not been for a chance meeting between a US military policeman and an American journalist with Spanish roots by the name of André del Amo. The full story of André, his brother, how they came to be in Mojácar and how André came to talk to this policeman has been told in "El País". But just to explain the chance meeting, André was asked by the policeman to translate. He wanted to tell local people to leave the area because of "radioactivity". The policeman used the word and then went on to tell André more or less the whole story. The official line had of course been to deny that the B-52 was carrying H-bombs. Del Amo's information ended up with "The New York Times". It published, the attempt to cover up was blown apart, and Franco went ballistic.

So this is some of the story that couldn't be reported in 1966. And something else that couldn't be reported was where the B-52 was going. The "eastern country" was apparently the Soviet Union, or its European borders at any rate. Those were the days.

* Read about André del Amo and the Palomares incident here: http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/01/14/inenglish/1389699914_451699.html

MALLORCA TODAY - Regional government to appeal Cala Carbó compensation

The Balearic Government will lodge an appeal against the decision of the Balearic High Court to order payment of 22.5 million euros compensation to landowners in Cala Carbó (Cala San Vicente), resulting from a 2008 reclassification of land that prevented development.

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - Cala Carbó owners will get lower compensation than demanded

The Balearics High Court has set a figure of 22.5 million euros as compensation to owners in Cala Carbó (Cala San Vicente) who were unable to develop land once a law of 2008 was introduced. 29 million had been demanded.

The High Court has thrown out a claim for compensation of 107 million euros by the company Ullal Parc Natural Apartaments S.L. which had been laid because the company believed that under land plans in Pollensa the development in Cala Carbó would switch to the area of Ullal in Puerto Pollensa.

See more: ARA Balears

MALLORCA TODAY - Pollensa town hall faces Vilar compensation claim

The intricacies of regulations regarding land, its classification and which authority is supposed to do what (or which doesn't) have been exposed by the case of the Vilar urbanisation in Pollensa. The regional government faces a compensation claim of over 16 million euros for not having implemented a plan to develop the urbanisation that dates back to 1983 and now Pollensa town hall faces a further claim for compensation from owners, it having in theory assumed responsibility for development in 1999 but which has not been effected, partly because of a classification ruling in 2008.

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - Government will have to pay Pollensa landowner 1.6 million compensation

A ruling by the Balearics Supreme Court will mean that the regional government will have to pay a landowner in the Vilar area of Pollensa 1.6 million euros by way of compensation for land that was declassified under measures in 2008 and which could not be developed. This is the first ruling that affects land across Mallorca, compensation claims for which are said to run to astronomical sums (the report linked to here puts the total at over 700 million!).

See more: Ultima Hora

MALLORCA TODAY - Ullal owners seek compensation from government

A different and ongoing dispute in Puerto Pollensa, that of the development of the Ullal wetland area. This complicated issue is bound up in provisions for land development that would have swapped development in Cala Carbó for development in Ullal. This led to land in Cala Carbó being bought by owners in the Ullal area in order that they could then develop in Ullal, this now having been blocked. As a result, owners are seeking compensation from the regional government.

See more: Ultima Hora

All Fall Down: Balcony diving again

On the "Ultima Hora" website some wag posted a comment under a news item. It read (and I'm translating here): "Balearic tourist promotion. Blue-flag beaches. UNESCO mountain heritage. University Hospital Son Espases (specialists in balconying)".

You can probably work out what the news item was about. The day after someone died falling out of a hotel in Ibiza, two more didn't quite bite the dust in terminal fashion: one in Cala Rajada, the other in Sa Coma. I might be inclined to make a not so funny gag about comas in Sa Coma, but I won't; in any event the one who made the descent suffered relatively minor injuries.

Balconying. Balcony diving. I've done the subject before, but it doesn't stop me doing it again. Another person commented under the news item that it was the "theme of the summer". Which may be true, but then it was last summer's theme too. And what a fine theme it is as well. If it weren't for the case that it can end in tragedy, as it did in Ibiza, then we could all have a jolly good laugh. Actually, we do have a laugh, because what else can you do when you learn of the lack of brain capacity of some visitors to Majorca and the Balearics and the potential for the brain to be permanently lacking as it spills out onto some poolside concrete.

Rather than repeat what has been said before, let's consider some of the thought processes and justifications that have been forthcoming from the incidents of what may be balcony diving or may be falls as a result of climbing from balcony to balcony.

Instead of just admitting that falls are because someone was mad enough to try and dive into a pool, what you get is some other reason. Not from the police, the paramedics or the hotels, but from the ones who have suffered injuries or from their friends.

One thing about balconies is that they have railings or some other elevated barrier. They are there for a good reason. To stop you falling off. I can think of only two really good excuses as to why anyone might find him or herself on such a barrier. One is that there is a fire. The other is that an axe murderer has broken into the room. Both might require that a certain risk is taken in effecting an escape. Otherwise there isn't a good excuse.

Nevertheless, you get excuses. The fall was the result of a slip. The hotel was negligent. Neither is satisfactory because they ignore the obvious and seek a justification or to apportion blame. I can give you an example of how this goes.

When one particular incident occurred, I posted something about it onto this blog. This attracted a great number of comments, one coming from someone claiming to be the person who had fallen (and it may well have been this person) and who refuted the idea that it had been a case of balcony diving. The best of all was someone who reckoned that the hotel should be sued.

Do people deliberately fall from balconies as a way of trying to extract compensation? It would be an extreme way to do so, but you can bet your life that compensation and ambulance-chasing legal firms are likely to loom into the equation.

The Ibizan hoteliers' president has been at pains to point out that the railing at the hotel in Ibiza is of a height that conforms with requirements and that everything possible has been done to prevent the sort of incident which occurred there. But why should he have to make this confirmation? Well, why do you think?

Hotels in Majorca and the Balearics fall foul of compensation claims all the time, and many are spurious. I mentioned all this in an article back in February ("Trying It On", 22 February). And the poor hotel is normally left with no alternative but to cough up for cases that are brought not in Spain but in the UK or elsewhere. With balcony diving, well, you would deny you'd done this if there was some possibility of getting compensation; not even ambulance-chasers could surely get it to stick if it was admitted, though you wouldn't put it past them trying. And crazy it would be if the hotel were held liable because someone had been crazy enough to take a dive.

There is such a thing as assuming responsibility, but the notion has become obsolete thanks to the rush to compensatory litigation and to assigning blame when blame resides elsewhere - splattered over a hotel terrace.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.