Aragón has spent the last week with its eyes fixed on the Ebro River. The copious rains that during the previous days fed the tributaries that go from the left bank (Cantabrian and Burgos areas) to the Gállego channel left significant floods that converged in the bed of the main river. The initial forecasts, which pointed to an “extraordinary” episode, ultimately remained “ordinary”, without the water reaching the urban area of ??any municipality. Even so, there was damage to the agricultural sector, with up to a thousand hectares of crops flooded in the Ribera Baja.
In Novillas, the gateway to the community, the maximum flow was recorded last Thursday, when the river reached about 2,000 cubic meters per second (m3/s) and 7.8 meters high, far from the 8.5 meters ago. three years. A day later, the flood reached Zaragoza, where the peak flow was 1,633 m3/s and a height of 4.5 meters. The city council activated its civil protection plan, evacuated storage rooms and warehouses and enabled compensatory parking at points far from the riverbank. The river, imposing in its path, left shocking images and flooded some parks and walks on the left bank, but little else.
More damage was suffered by the Ribera Baja, where the flood flooded about a thousand hectares of crops on Saturday and a section of the A-1107 highway had to be cut, in the municipality of Pina de Ebro. Given this situation, the mayors of the area They asked for solutions so that the floods do not jeopardize the economy of their neighbors every time there is a flood and they demanded greater cleaning of the riverbed. “It is not normal that with 1,600 cubic meters we are all worried. We should be watching the Ebro go down calmly, happy that it carries that amount of water, and that it does not cause damage,” summarized the councilor of Quino de Ebro, Jesús Morales. From here, an already declining river continued its advance towards the Mequinenza and Flix reservoirs, where the discharged flow is stabilized at about 900 m3/s, the Ebro Hydrographic Confederation (CHE) reported late yesterday.
This organization also highlighted the discharges and lamination of the floods that have been carried out before and during this last flood in the reservoirs of Ullibarri and Urrúnaga (Basque Country), Eugi, Alloz, Itoiz and Yesa (Navarra), Mansilla (La Rioja ) and in the Mequinensa, Ribarroja-Flix (Aragón-Catalunya) system, which “have been able to reduce the maximum flows downstream of them and reduce possible effects.”
With this latest episode, the Ebro basin reservoirs were at 68.2% of their total capacity on Friday, according to data from the CHE. They are 8.5 points more than just a year ago, but 5.6 points below the average of the last five years.
This latest flood of the Ebro contrasts with the situation suffered by the internal basins of Catalonia, where a persistent drought and lack of water is already affecting the consumption of its populations. Even so, the parties of Aragon, including the PP-Vox Government, are categorically opposed to any connection of the Ebro network with the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona, ??as once again suggested by the four professional associations that make up the Intercol Observatory. legal of the Sequera.
