The DANA that has devastated Valencia has left behind a long list of reflections to be made. Among them, the one that concerns not only hydraulic works, but also the direction of Spain’s water policy. As illustrated this Wednesday by the National Federation of Irrigation Communities (Fenacore), while the Government has budgeted 2.5 billion euros to restore rivers (which includes the demolition of abandoned weirs), hydraulic infrastructure drags an investment hole that reaches 3,000 million. «Is this the priority of Spanish hydraulic policy? Destroy small weirs that are a hundred years old, and then there is no money to make the dams that will allow the lamination of avenues? [crecidas en los ríos]?”, asked its president, Juan Valero de Palma.
The association that represents 700,000 irrigators estimates that to date only three out of every ten euros of the investment planned in the previous hydrological plans and that 29.2% of hydraulic infrastructures of general interest have not been built. «There has beenor a stoppage in the construction of reservoirs because these things have not been analyzed in a technical, scientific way. Too much ideology has been involved and we have gone to the other extreme: from building many reservoirs to not building any,” he criticized.
Specifically, in the previous hydrological planning, up to one hundred dams. Of these, the current hydrological plans They have only planned the construction of 27 throughout Spain. The rest have been discarded. For this reason, Fenacore requests that in the short term at least these 27 be executed. “They are essential in a country like Spain,” said the president of the irrigators, who has defended that they not only help control floods in the rivers in case of torrential rains, they also provide water security against drought, allow development of agriculture or obtaining hydroelectric energy.
However, in the medium term, Fenacore calls for greater reflection. «It is curious that the province with the largest flood of the century, Valencia, “no prey is planned”Valero highlighted. In the opinion of the irrigators, it is time to review cost-benefit studies for which the construction of dams planned in previous planning was denied and to analyze the causes that have led to the abandonment of other projects.
«If we want this [la tragedia en Valencia] not be repeated again, the 27 approved reservoirs that are made. We have already given up on 70 reservoirs that were in the second planning cycle and “that should be reviewed”said Valero, who also stressed that four dams were planned in the Júcar basin to prevent flooding. «I ask that Let’s review the cost-benefit analysis. l“To society, with the information that this DANA gives us, we will probably have to consider if we had built these dams and they had been executed, how many lives we would have saved and how many millions of euros we would have saved.”
On the other hand, the irrigators association has quantified the damage caused by DANA. In total, the floods have caused losses of more than 250 million euros, since not only has the year’s harvest of vineyards, persimmons, citrus and other productions been lost, but damage has also been detected in irrigation infrastructure.
#Irrigators #reevaluate #dams #discarded #hydrological #plans #DANA #Valencia
