Empire Rising: Spain

Wooden houses are built quickly, of course, these houses are certainly not as sturdy as those made of reinforced concrete.

However, for the current Spain, wooden houses are already sufficient, and the main goal is to improve the living conditions of the workers.

With the completion and use of the first batch of wooden houses, the living conditions of factory workers in Spain have changed from dozens of people crowding into one room to ten people in one room, and each person’s bed is slightly larger, allowing at least the freedom to turn over.

Overall, the workers in Spain are quite satisfied with the new dormitories. Along with the construction of new dormitories, the safe water supply project was also initiated.

The so-called safe water supply project is essentially providing drinking water to cities, towns, and factories through large water utility companies.

Currently, in large cities like Madrid and Barcelona, there are still existing water utility companies. But in the suburban factories and farther towns, there are no such water companies.

People generally depend on underground wells for drinking, and some directly draw water from rivers, drinking it immediately after collection.

When Spain had no industry, the river water was still relatively clean. But no matter how clean, it contained bacteria, and Carlo himself did not advocate drinking raw water.

Moreover, with the development of industry in Spain, some rivers have already been polluted.

This is certainly not the era of advocating sustainable development, and existing industrial technologies cannot achieve low-pollution industry.

It is no exaggeration to say that the industry’s nature at this time is high-pollution. To make the country’s industry strong, one must bear the risks of land and water source pollution.

Under such circumstances, ensuring that the public’s drinking water is filtered and disinfected becomes very important.

When deciding to improve the workers’ living and working environment, Carlo also thought of using tap water to replace the previous drinking methods of Spaniards, letting formal companies supply water uniformly to the Spanish public.

Of course, changing all Spaniards’ drinking to tap water is absolutely a very long process.

Carlo decided to set Madrid and Barcelona as pilot locations. These two cities already have small water utility companies and, given their larger populations, they can fully serve as the first step in Spain’s promotion of tap water.

Of course, the factories in the outskirts of these two cities will be the first to comprehensively provide tap water.

Building wooden houses for workers is a great opportunity to simultaneously provide them with tap water, replacing the previous way of fetching water from wells and rivers.

The Ministry of Industry has accordingly issued regulations requiring all factories on the outskirts of Madrid and Barcelona to provide tap water to the workers. If it is found that workers’ drinking water is river or underground well water, the factory will be penalized.

Considering that the two cities do not have enough water utility plants to supply all factories, until the supply from the water utility plants meets the demand, factories can use boiled well water instead of tap water for workers.

The safe water supply project is still very necessary, at least it can reduce the incidence rate of diseases among Spaniards.

Drinking boiled water and tap water cannot completely prevent Spaniards from falling ill, but drinking river water and well water will surely cause them to contract corresponding diseases.

To make Spaniards accept the concept of drinking boiled water and tap water, Carlo also had various newspapers publish a large number of news articles related to disease transmission and drinking water, as well as sanitation environment, and achieved excellent results.

Workers changed from initially not quite accepting drinking boiled water to urging factories to provide hot water, and even prodded the government to expedite the construction of water utility plants to supply tap water to factories.

Due to the pressure from workers, it became impossible for factory owners not to provide hot water. If they refused to provide boiled water to the workers, workers would label the factory owners as deliberately spreading diseases, risking factory shutdowns.

In such a situation, factory owners simply do not dare not to cooperate. Fortunately, providing hot water is also very simple and doesn’t require significant expenditure from the factory owners.

With the government’s issuance of two consecutive directives, Baron Angelo Orkaho, the chief administrator of the Barcelona Industrial Base, immediately became the busiest person in all of Spain.

At the beginning of this year, phase three of the Barcelona Industrial Base was successfully completed, and the three phases merged into the Barcelona Industrial Zone.

As the chief administrator of the industrial base, Baron Angelo Orkaho naturally became the first district governor of the Barcelona Industrial Zone.

As an important industrial area being developed by Spain, the political status of the Barcelona Industrial Zone parallels that of a city, and it even has its own district assembly and district government.

The position of district governor held by Baron Angelo Orkaho is more important than the mayor of a city in Spain.

Only the mayors of the major cities of Madrid and Barcelona can surpass Baron Angelo in status and importance.

From the downfall of the family to serving as the district governor of the industrial zone, Baron Angelo Orkaho certainly understands who helped him.

Therefore, after the government issued its directives, Baron Angelo Orkaho immediately mobilized all departments of the industrial zone government to oversee the reforms in all factories within the industrial zone.

The good news is that since the Barcelona Industrial Zone was just recently completed, most workers’ living and working conditions in the factories are already at the acceptable level.