Towards the months of March and April 2008, the Barcelona region reached such an extreme level of drought that the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was forced to approve a decree law that authorized bringing water from the Ebro to the Catalan capital by connecting the Tarragona’s supply network with that of Barcelona. The project was awarded by emergency means (without competition, in a hurry), but when the machines were about to enter, the process was abruptly interrupted. Because?
Four professional associations (engineers, economists) have now recovered the proposal to carry out this connection to resort to it in cases of extreme need. His argument is that if that work had been carried out, Barcelona would now have a great opportunity to overcome the current drought.
But what suddenly paralyzed that infrastructure, when it was already on track?
The cause was the copious rains in May (which allowed the reserves to be recovered) together with the legal threats from the Aragonese socialist government of Marcelino Iglesias (which even announced the filing of an appeal before the Constitutional Court), which aggravated internal tensions in the PSOE.
The connection of the Tarragona networks with that of Barcelona activated the administrative machinery, but everything came to nothing with an abrupt outcome that was the culmination of the lack of effective response of the institutions to the periodic droughts in Catalonia and the lack of planning.
The drought of 2007-2008 gave rise to very bitter debates and political, social and territorial confrontations between supporters of the transfers and the incipient new water culture, whose ideas marked the tripartite government.
The situation in the Barcelona region was distressing in March 2008; The Ter and Llobregat reservoirs were close to 20%, and Barcelona only had water for 200 days.
Councilor Francesc Baltasar (ICV) first attempted to capture flows from the Segre River (to take them to the headwaters of the Llobregat through a gallery through the Cadí tunnel). The Ministry of the Environment dismissed the idea as unviable and proposed, as an alternative, connecting the Ebro water network (the mini-transfer to Camp de Tarragona) to Barcelona. To this end, it approved an emergency decree law and thus circumvented the restrictive mini-transfer law of 1981, which prohibited water from the Ebro from transferring to the province of Tarragona.
It was decided to build a pipeline of 60 kilometers and two meters in diameter to transport the equivalent of the mini-transfer flows not used by Tarragona. The pipeline would link Tarragona with Olèrdola with a route parallel to the AP-7 and the work is expected to be completed in six months. And it was awarded to a group of companies headed by Agbar for 164 million euros. The work was left in the hands of Manuel Hernández, head of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA). They acted quickly; on the edge of the knife.
For this reason, at the end of March, Minister Baltasar prayed to the Virgin Moreneta in Montserrat for rain, as he confessed: “You know that I am agnostic, but if you can do something, do it.”
The panorama changed radically in the month of May (2008), which was very rainy; The reservoirs went from a minimum of 126 hm3 (they are currently at 100.3 hm3) to 170 hm3, which allowed the Catalan tripartite to gradually lift the alert phases (until completely deactivating it in 2009).
The rumor that the Barcelona area no longer needed water from the Ebro was a tsunami in Aragon, which asked to suppress the Ebro connection and announced an appeal for unconstitutionality. The Spanish Government responded that the connection would only transport water in case of emergency, refuted criticism of the commercialization of water from Aragon saying that it was only a free transfer and claimed that it was even reversible (it could serve in the opposite direction, if necessary, to carry water from the Ter and the Llobregat to Tarragona).
But the pressure continued to grow. A demonstration in Tortosa brought together 20,000 people against the “covert transfer.” And at the end of May, the rains had brought triple the resources that had to be transported to the Ter and the Llobregat. All of this led the Government to repeal the decree and compensate the companies with 6% of the lost profits.
La Moreneta worked miracles; even politicians. Water fell in torrents and above all it opened the sky for the Government because it allowed it to get rid of the pressure of the Aragonese president Iglesias by repealing the controversial decree law, which had caused great political tension in the socialist ranks.
Those who justify the stoppage of work argue that the pipeline was conditional on the emergency and that if it had continued, the works would have been carried out; They also allege that the project (a transfer of water, not a fixed concession) was no longer necessary just as the works had just begun.
On the other hand, those in favor of the connection see this argument as fallacious, since it presupposes that if it had continued without rain until the work was finished, if the emergency was overcome, after its conclusion, it would have involved dismantling the pipeline as it was no longer necessary. There was no single voice either. And it even generated internal contradictions in ICV.
Manuel Hernández, then director of the ACA (resolute manager in that drought), believes that social, political and territorial pressure (rejection of the government of Aragon, of the irrigators and mobilization of the Terres de l’Ebre) was stronger than the character structural of the work, useful for other moments of emergency. “The Zaragoza Expo was going to be held on water, and Zapatero had to inaugurate it. It was obvious that he was going to be badly received; I think that’s why he decided to stop the work. But it should have been maintained to be able to face future emergencies like the one now,” says Hernández.
