Aragon has spent the last week with its eyes on the Ebro. The copious rains that during the previous days fed the tributaries that go from the left bank (Cantabrian and Burgos area) to the course of the Gállego left significant floods that converged on the bed of the main river. The initial forecasts, which pointed to an “extraordinary” episode, ended up being “ordinary”, without the water reaching the urban center of any municipality. Even so, they affected the agricultural sector, with up to a thousand hectares of crops denied in Erribera Beitia.
In Novillas, gateway to the community, the maximum flow was recorded on Thursday, when the river reached about 2,000 cubic meters per second (m3/s) and 7.8 meters high, far from the 8.5 three years ago The next day, 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, vacated storerooms and warehouses and enabled compensatory parking in points far from the riverbank. The river, imposing in its path, left shocking images and denied some parks and walks of the left bank, but little else.
It affected Erribera Beitia more, where the flood flooded about a thousand hectares of crops on Saturday and a section of the A-1107 road, in the municipality of Pina de Ebro, had to be cut off. In view of this situation, the mayors of the area asked for solutions so that floods do not endanger the economy of their neighbors every time there is one and they demanded more cleaning of the course. “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 this amount of water, and that it does no harm”, summed up Quinto’s councilor, Jesús Morales. From here, a river already in decline followed its progress towards the reservoirs of Mequinensa and Flix, where the discharged flow is stabilized at around 900 m3/s, the Hydrographic Confederation of the Ebro reported last night (CHE).
From this body, they also emphasized the removal of reservoirs and lamination of the floods that have occurred before and during this last avenue in the reservoirs of Ullibarri and Urrunaga (Basque Country), Eugi, Alloz, Itoiz and Yesa (Navarra), Mansilla (La Rioja) and in the system of Mequinensa, Riba-roja-Flix (Aragon-Catalunya), which “have been able to reduce the maximum flows downstream of them and to reduce the possible conditions”.
With this latest episode, the reservoirs of the Ebro basin 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 adamantly opposed to any connection of the Ebro network with the metropolitan area of ??Barcelona, ??as the four suggested again professional associations that make up the Drought Intercollegiate Observatory.
