“Four floods in a row. When we clean one, we remove the earth and mud, up to 20 tons each time, and another one comes and floods the town again.” The one who is lamenting helplessly is María José Rubio, the mayor of Báguena, in Teruel, who last weekend had to evacuate the 500 people who were enjoying the festival of the patron saints in her pavilion because of the flooding caused by the flood and the storms. Her municipality is one of the epicentres of this volcano of water, stone and mud that hit Aragon. And now another one is coming. The State Meteorological Agency (Aemet) has launched a warning to This Friday and Saturday the orange warningthis time for the Pyrenees, due to heavy rains that They can reach 100 liters per square meter and can cause flooding in northern rivers and significant increases in flow in ravines, According to the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation. This Friday afternoon there were rivers such as the Ara, in the Huesca Pyrenees, that were already heavily loaded with water as they passed through Broto.
This community in the northeast of Spain has been threatened by downpours since August 28. The Aemet warnings for the storms have only changed colour with little respite in the three Aragonese provinces. The result is a landscape of closed roads, destroyed paths, towns with flooded streets, power cuts, clogged pipes and overflowing sewage. Like something from another planet.
“There are many situations in Aragon that cause more severe storms,” explains Cadena SER meteorologist Jordi Carbó. “Troughs, or cold air at altitude, scare us here because we know that they can have very peculiar behaviour,” he adds. This is confirmed by Miguel Ángel Clavero, general director of the Civil Protection service of the Government of Aragon: “Here we are used to suffering adverse weather phenomena frequently and we already know what we have to do.”
For the first time, the special plan that the Aragonese Executive has launched for this type of episode was activated last week, according to its new Emergency Law. This new plan aims to achieve greater coordination between all institutions and also to improve information about adverse meteorological phenomena for all citizens. It includes warnings through the Government’s social networks and 112 Aragón, giving advice and aims to advance by specifying the territory by area, improving planning and procedures for intervention, integrating all previous plans into one.
The storms in this area are particularly virulent, with stronger winds, large amounts of water concentrated in a short period of time, rivers rising and, therefore, in ravines, and all accompanied by hail, even of large size. Furthermore, Carbó explains, “the Pyrenees act as a natural barrier, which causes the storms to stay longer in this territory. In fact, we are detecting that the storms no longer cross the entire Peninsula and stagnate on this southern side of the Pyrenees before reaching the Mediterranean.”
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“Anything that exceeds one litre per minute causes problems, it is what we call torrential rain,” recalls Carbó. And that is exactly what will happen again this weekend and has happened in recent days in numerous Aragonese towns, especially in the province of Zaragoza and Teruel. Up to 67 litres per square metre fell in places like Burbáguena (Teruel), whose mayor, Joaquín Peribañez, described it thus: “We have lived a nightmare because nobody imagined what was going to happen, with wind and hail, and with a lot of bad blood.”
In this municipality, the National 234 had to be closed due to the downpour and fallen trees. This was not the only one. In the province of Huesca, in the Sierra de Guara, the rains took away more than a metre and a half of the A-1227 road, which left the two towns of Yaso and Bastarás isolated. It is expected that it will take three months to repair one of the sections. Cimballa, in Calatayud, was isolated several times in a week due to the flooding of the Piedra River. 160 passengers on the train to Valencia were left cut off for more than five hours at the Ferreruela de Huerva station (Teruel). “There were children and elderly people and we made sandwiches in a hurry to take them,” says its mayor, Óscar Gracia. Even in the capital of Huesca, one of its exits, towards the N-240, was closed due to the landslides caused by the downpours.
The effects of these torrential rains are still being quantified, but the weather forecast does not give any respite. For this reason, the mayors have shown their helplessness and limited capacity, especially financial, to deal with the repairs and damage, and have asked for help. Not only are crops ruined, but also “pipes, drains, irrigation ditches… because the water has leaked and now we have to see how to unblock them,” complains the mayor of Báguena (Teruel), as well as the mayor of Anento (Zaragoza). The provincial councils have taken a step forward and have offered to take charge of the damage. The Zaragoza council will hold a plenary session next week, in which it will ask the central government to declare the area a disaster zone.
It is not only the amount that will have to be invested in repairs, but also the amount of income that has not been received. Many towns have been hit by these storms in the middle of the patron saint festivities and still in the tourist season. Like Aínsa (Huesca), which was forced to cancel its traditional Morisma; or in Plenas, in the Belchite region, where a dozen cars of visitors were left without a window because of the hail. According to data from the Provincial Council, there are 40 municipalities affected in the province of Teruel alone, and in Zaragoza, around twenty. And this weekend, with the ground still wet, in Aragon they will continue to look to the sky.
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