The Minister of Climate Action of the Generalitat, David Mascort, has confirmed that, if the current emergency phase due to drought persists in summer, the municipal pools will not be able to be filled, although he has opened the door to studying exceptions if any facility represents the the only climatic refuge in the area.
“Let’s imagine that in a neighborhood there is no library, reading room or air-conditioned spaces to take refuge; in these cases we could study that the -municipal- swimming pool becomes a climatic refuge and then it could be filled, but under normal conditions it cannot be filled. can do,” the minister explained this Monday in an interview on TV3. To do this, Mascort has indicated that they are going to do “a census of climatic refuges”, to determine which pools could fall into the exception.
The current emergency phase due to drought, which affects Barcelona and Girona, prohibits the filling of swimming pools with fresh water in all cases, which includes private swimming pools, hotels, campgrounds, gyms -except in some cases of federated sports-, municipal and community.
Last summer the ban only affected private swimming pools, without affecting municipal or hotel pools, but, if the water situation does not improve, next summer may be different. In this context, the tourism sector of Lloret de Mar (Girona) has recently announced that it will buy a mobile desalination plant to supply and supply water to this town, which multiplies its population in summer, as occurs in other municipalities on the Costa Brava.
Regarding this project, the counselor has highlighted that “they are not contemplated” in the Government’s Drought Plan, so their fit into the legal norm will have to be studied. He has indicated that, to use sea water, “there must be an administrative concession from Costas, an authorization from the Catalan Water Agency and an environmental license depending on the volume they extract.”
Thus, we will have to see “the complete project” of the mobile desalination plant, because it is not the same as “extracting 30,000, 1,500 or 500 m3” of sea water per day. “The technical conditions will determine whether it can be done or not, but as far as possible we will try to make it possible,” said the councilor.
