The president of the Tarragona Water Consortium (CAT), Joan Alginet, defends a water management model that has a long-term view, reusing more water with regeneration in the water treatment plants or desalination plants.
Thanks to these actions, he said, it is possible to consider “reducing dependence on water consumption from the Ebro” in the Tarragona metropolitan area and even studying and planning “the reversal of the mini-transfer of the river.
Alginet rejects that the Foix desalination plant ends up hiding the interconnection of basins, because it would not be technically possible, offering its technical structure to manage a second desalination plant closer to Tarragona and Reus, as proposed by the port of Tarragona.
The president of the CAT recognizes that water “will be a source of growing controversy,” especially in periods of scarcity like the current one.
He claims that it is in “moments of difficulty” that “long-term” scenarios must be prepared and “planned and allocated resources” to hydraulic policies that “go beyond the ideological perspective and the political battle.”
“Precisely because it is not an easy debate, simple solutions cannot be provided,” says Joan Alginet, who demands “unity of action” and “responsibility”, especially for those political forces “that want to govern Catalonia.”
Alginet regrets that only “immediacy” has been managed, with few resources to carry out actions at a local level, which “added and aggregated” would have a country impact.
“Political fights on the issue of water only generate mistrust and misinformation. Citizens do not perceive that it is an important structural issue and it is very difficult for them to end up paying attention to the measures or recommendations made by governments,” he warned.
Joan Alginet has defended that the CAT infrastructure is preventing the metropolitan area of ??Tarragona from suffering like the rest of the internal basins and has turned it into “the most resilient area in the drought of Catalonia.” “They imagined, planned investments and actions that today allow us to be in this situation,” defended the president of the CAT.
“The key infrastructures are those that demonstrate this in times of difficulty and adversity and – that of the Consorci – has shown that it has been key so that Tarragona and the industry and the entire Camp de Tarragona do not have restrictions,” he remarked.
The president of the Consorci trusts that his consortiums will avoid restrictions due to the emergency by proving that “the water resource they use comes from reuse and water from the Ebro.”
Despite the situation in the province of Tarragona, Alginet rejects the model being replicated in the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona, ??with the interconnection with the Ebro basin. He denies that the model proposed by the lobby of some professional associations can be “reversible” .
“I would like you to tell me what water they will send from Barcelona to the south. There are no swamps, there are no aquifers, there are no rivers… What will they send? Reclaimed or desalinated water? It makes no sense,” he rejected.
However, it does claim this model of reuse and reuse of water to “depend less on the natural resources of rivers” and supports the possibility of building a desalination plant in the Tarragona area to reinforce this planned supply with that of the Foix area. , for the Penedès area and north of Camp de Tarragona.
The Foix desalination plant, he says, is “an instrument to have guarantees quite imminently” to supply the consortium municipalities that are further away from the Ebro. Even so, he insists that it is “insufficient” and that another is needed, like a stall the port of Tarragona, closer to the capital of Tarragona.
The CAT celebrates that the Tarragona port entity “contributes to this debate” and offers its management model. “The Consortium can participate because it has the technical structure and its corporate purpose is what it is,” said Alginet.
“We can do it, we can put our knowledge and our experience at the service of the province,” he remarked. These water infrastructures, in addition to offering an alternative to collecting the Ebro, said Alginet, can “help reduce dependence on water consumption from the river.”
Alginet has pointed out that reducing the Ebro mini-transfer is also “his mission” at the head of the Consorci and does not rule out reversal.
“We can talk about pressing a button and everything stops and we return to an idyllic world before the 80s, or we can talk about reversal with the complicity of the hydraulic administration of Catalonia, with these actions to reuse water, as it is doing. the industry of Camp de Tarragona, which will increasingly need less of the Ebro,” he exemplified.
“The reversal – of the Ebro mini-transfer in Tarragona – is possible. If these actions are carried out, which are acceptable and easily applicable, the reversal will be a reality,” defended the president of the Consortium. In this sense, Alginet demanded that the Tarragona Water Consortium maintain Ebrense leadership in the future, “from the perspective of territorial imbalance and to rethink the same management model of the consortium.”
“I understand that for many years there has been mistrust and even a desire to end up in the same Consortium. The debate is much more complex. Surely if it were easy to reverse it, we would have already done it, but we can do accompaniment and work with an Ebrense accent , to stop interested models from the anti-transfer logic”, he claimed.
In addition to the Foix desalination plants or the one that could be built near Tarragona, Alginet also claims to improve the network below the municipalities and celebrates projects such as the one presented by the Tarragona Provincial Council, a support action so that the municipalities can detect leaks of municipal networks.
