Droughts have telling parallels. The shipment of water from the Ebro in tankers from the port of Tarragona helped to deal with the serious water deficit of the island of Mallorca in the mid-1990s. 275 trips were chartered in two and a half years (1995-1997) to bring 16.5 cubic hectometres (hm³) of drinking water. It was called Operation Barco.
The pipe that the technicians of the port of Tarragona have already checked in case it is necessary to refill ships with water from the Ebro mini transfer, now towards Barcelona, ??is known as the Mallorca pipe. The memory is present.
The Móstoles, an old oil tanker, was used. Another parallel. The first shipment to Palma was a failure. All the water from the chartered tanker in mid-April 1995 had to be discharged into the sea. The water tasted like paint. About 30,000 cubic meters of drinking water ended up wasted, thrown into the port of Palma, which caused a media scandal and a political crisis.
The Móstoles was not to blame, which according to the analyzes of the time transported the water in good conditions. The problem had its origin in a solvent used to coat the tank walls of the Cabo Prior reservoir vessel, which acted as a tank in the port of Palma to speed up the whole process. From here it was then distributed through the Palma and Calvià network.
The then Minister of Public Works and Development, Josep Borrell (PSOE), held the Balearic Government (PP) responsible for hiring the shipping company and supervising the unloading operations.
The first tanker sent from Tarragona in the spring of 2008 to help cope with the drought in Barcelona was also damaged. That fiasco happened on tiptoe. The arrival of the rains eased the political and media focus and a page was turned.
The figures of the Barco operation, with two and even three Móstoles trips every week, can give an idea of ??the enormous cost of tankers. The shipment of 16.5 hm³ of water from the Ebro to Mallorca in ships from the port of Tarragona for two and a half years resulted in a bill of 5,800 million of the old pesetas. In exchange, 34.8 million euros, to which must be added the very high increase in the cost of living (cumulative CPI), since almost 30 years have passed.
The goal is to cover 20% of the island’s consumption. The town councils of Palma and Calvià, with a subsidy from the Balearic government (4.3 million euros), financed the controversial Barco operation, which was not fully paid for until 2006. Then there were also protests from Les Terres of the Ebro
Economically, it was a very beneficial operation for the Consorci d’Aigües de Tarragona (CAT), the public interest entity that manages the mini-transfer in Tarragona. CAT received 912 million pesetas (5.4 million euros) for water. The money helped to improve CAT’s distribution network in Tarragona and also that of Terres de l’Ebre, as Joan Miquel Nadal (CDC), former mayor of Tarragona and president of CAT at the time, remembers.
Last parallelism. Mallorca has overcome the water deficit thanks to the construction of new desalination plants. In 1997, however, it was the rain that made it possible to close the Barco operation.