The engineers of roads, canals and ports of Spain demanded this Monday a “State pact on water” after the devastating DANA on October 29, which caused the death of 222 people, especially in Valencia due to flooding.
The president of the College of Civil, Canal and Port Engineers, Miguel Ángel Carrillo, launched that request in an institutional statement read this Monday at the beginning of a day in Madrid where various experts analyzed the causes, consequences and solutions related to DANA .
“From the College today we call on all political forces, all national, regional, provincial and local institutions to urgently agree on a State Pact on water,” he noted.
The declaration indicates that “Spain needs and deserves a consensus on water that guarantees the execution of the investments included in the hydrological plans and in those for the defense of floods in the hydrographic basins.”
In this sense, he points out that “water has no ideology, and its management should not have one either” and opted for “charting the long-term course of the State in matters of water, where technical criteria, co-governance between administrations with total independence of the governing party and localist interests.
«In Spain we have already demonstrated our ability to reach agreements. This is what happened with the Moncloa Pacts in 1977 with reforms in the political, economic and social sphere. Also with the Toledo Pact on the pension system in 1995, the Pact for Freedoms and against Terrorism in 2000 or the State Pact against Gender Violence reached in 2017. Now, more than ever, is the time to promote a State Pact on water,” states the institutional declaration.
“Discouraging”
Carrillo pointed out that “the human losses and damages” of the DANA could have been reduced and he “deeply regretted” that the technical recommendations of the road, canal and port engineers on the construction of hydraulic infrastructures, their maintenance and the cleaning of river beds.
“We also demand that the only competent technician in matters of dam safety be a civil engineer to guarantee the correct functioning of these infrastructures,” he stressed.
In addition, he called for the incorporation of municipal road engineers in town councils to contribute to proposing technical solutions in flood risk areas.
«In the 21st century, in a developed country like ours, a reference in Europe in many areas, with a group of civil engineers valued throughout the world for their technical solvency, our society cannot and should not accept, under any circumstances , that a human and material tragedy of this magnitude occurs again,” he added.
Carrillo considered it “disheartening” and “very difficult to understand” that, more than a month after the tragedy, “the main political parties of our nation only agree to criticize each other for the management of this emergency.”
«Water is life. Where it is scarce, it must be taken. And where water produces floods, they must be controlled. Without a doubt, one of the main challenges we face in Spain is water management, specifically when floods occur caused by extreme rains and also in the face of droughts,” he commented.
Economic damages
The institutional declaration indicates that Spain has a risk of desertification of 75% of its territory and nearly three million people live in potentially floodable areas in a flood return period of 500 years.
“A consensus on water is urgent and cannot be postponed where the technical solutions proposed by civil engineers in the face of natural disasters support and improve the effectiveness of political decisions,” he adds.
Furthermore, the text indicates that “the human and material consequences of this tragic DANA could have been reduced if the hydraulic infrastructures that were planned had been built.”
It points out that, in addition to the human losses, DANA caused one million people affected across autonomous communities, 69,000 homes and 120,000 vehicles damaged.
According to the National Federation of Irrigation Communities of Spain, DANA caused damage to the infrastructure that irrigates 70,000 hectares of the Valencian Community, Andalusia and Castilla-La Mancha.
In addition, it affected some 30,000 companies and caused a loss of the productive fabric worth more than 13.3 billion euros. And the Bank of Spain has estimated that DANA will subtract 1,000 million from GDP growth in the fourth quarter of the year.
A first estimate considers that the reconstruction of communication infrastructure and the management of waste from the damage caused by DANA alone will cost 2.6 billion euros.
“We are, therefore, facing a true human, economic and material disaster that shows that investing in hydraulic infrastructure is profitable from any perspective,” states the institutional statement.
On the other hand, road, port and canal engineers opted to “review and improve action protocols” to notify the population more effectively taking into account that more than half of the deceased were over 70 years old.
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