Three years have passed since the devastating passage of the Gloria storm through the Ebro delta and there are effects of that damage that last. The violent storm broke the coastline and flooded thousands of hectares of beach and rice paddies with salt water, opening up an extensive strip of land of high environmental value. The adaptability of the delta has made it possible to restore, in a natural way, areas of the coastline that were devastated, but there are shores that were left raw and whose erosion cannot be stopped. To try to stop the action of the waves and shield the morphology of the coastline, the delta entrusts itself to an emergency plan to mobilize 11 million cubic meters of sand.
“Since Gloria there is no protection system and there is a consensus that it is necessary to find a solution that is as natural as possible,” reasons Xavier Curto, spokesman for the Delta Consensus Table, an entity that brings together the seven delta municipalities and its two irrigation communities. Curto points out that the majority of technical studies agree that the preferred option is to articulate a defense barrier that widens the beach to mitigate the energy of the waves. On this basis, the Generalitat has tendered the works to mobilize 11 million cubic meters of sand. Specifically, the first step consists of studying the volumes of land that the sea currents have submerged off the coast of the delta to know the quantity, and quality, of that dregs. Mainly, the sandy accumulation is concentrated at the ends of the delta. That is, in El Fangar, in front of l’Ampolla, and in Punta de la Banya, in the far south, in front of La Ràpita.
The dredging of these sandy wells should serve to fill in the areas that have yielded to the thrust of the sea. These are, above all, the Marquesa and Riumar beaches, in Deltebre, the Illa de Buda and the Barra del Trabucador. The entire intervention has a cost of 60 million euros. Xavier Curto calculates that it will be visible from the year 2025 and that it will then require maintenance. “The idea is to recover the land that the sea has eaten up, and keep it,” he illustrates.
At the end of January 2020, during the days of convulsion over the passage of the Gloria, the then President of the Generalitat, Quim Torra, stated that an urgent response was needed to the Ebro delta: “It cannot wait any longer, a immediate action plan,” he said. “Three years after the Gloria, there is still a lot of work to be done,” the mayor of Deltebre, Lluís Soler, recently stated.
Xavier Curto highlights that with what he calls the Delta Strategy, the Government has taken a turn in its way of proceeding. “The Generalitat’s policy in the delta always consisted of positioning itself as the plaintiff, alleging that it could not do anything because the powers belonged to the State.” Curto points out that this was a comfortable but fictitious position: “From the Table we always said that it was not true, because the Generalitat does have environmental powers.”
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The Minister of Climate Action, Teresa Jordà, announced in Parliament her interest in having a good relationship with the Ministry for Ecological Transition. “Almost no administration can take action to protect the Delta without some other administration being involved.” The movements of sand proposed by the Generalitat affect the maritime-terrestrial domain, a strip that is state competence. For this purpose, a State-Generalitat commission has been designed to coordinate the work to protect the coastal strip.
All of this is taking place while the municipalities of the delta once again set their sights upriver. The Council of Ministers has given the green light to the new hydrological plan for the Ebro basin for the period 2023-2027. The framework document opens the door for the first time to the possibility of recovering part of the sediments that remain stuck in the river dams, in the case of the Riba-roja reservoir. This is a historical claim of the municipalities of the delta, which maintain that the mud is essential to cement the protection of the mouth. How and when the sludge will be able to reach the lower section of the river is a question that at the moment only raises questions.
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