The Generalitat of Catalonia has specified this Tuesday the exceptional water saving measures that would come into force when the drought emergency. They include a very severe restriction of irrigation of parks and gardenswhich leads Barcelona City Council to a difficult prioritization of green spaces because there will not be water for everyone. If it does not rain generously enough to reverse the current trend, the City Council must have the classification ready in two weeks.
The Catalan guideline authorizes only survival irrigation in public gardens with “alternative water resources”, that is, groundwater and regenerated water from treatment plants, which do not compete with drinking water. A big change for a city accustomed to using tap water for 80% of irrigation. Fortunately Barcelona has a huge amount of groundwater underground, but unfortunately still lacks the infrastructure necessary to exploit it to the level that it would need now. The regenerated one, which could buy like other metropolitan municipalities do, also requires a good distribution network.
Thus, in the absence of dispersed deposits and pipelines that cover the entire city, the main contingency instrument is 28 tanker trucks. They are already used every day as mobile supply points for cleaning vans and those of Parks and Gardens, each with a capacity of about 1,000 liters. Municipal sources defend that Barcelona cannot improvise more vehicles to transport water and that, in any case, an entire logistics must be designed to see where they park, the routes, the filling… We will have to get through the drought with these material stocks and stretch them to the maximum.
With the lack evident, the council has put out to tender 14.4 million euros in expansions of sustainable irrigation infrastructure over the next four years. They are complex works, which will not be finished this summer. But the problem is that the homework was not done: the same sources point out that from 1999 to today about 20 million had been invested in improvements to the groundwater network alone.
Which parks have an advantage
The map below, provided by the council to EL PERIÓDICO and updated this January 15, shows what the starting situation is. Due to the orography of the city, The groundwater is concentrated in the plain of Barcelona –Eixample, Ciutat Vella…– and it is very scarce in mountainous neighborhoods. This explains the unequal distribution of parks that have more and less difficulty surviving the restriction.
The water cut will be drastic. If Barcelona’s irrigation normally consumed 3.00 hm3 of water per year (0.5 hm3 of phreatic), with the current exceptional phase this quantity has been reduced by half: 1.27 hm3 (0.37% hm3 of phreatic). But the next stage, the emergency stage, involves going down to 0.87 hm3 annually, less than a third of normal irrigation and entirely in charge of the subsoil.
The handful of parks that appear in green color They are the advantaged ones: they are located on water reserves and use them for their subsistence. For example, Diagonal Mar, Clot, all of Glòries and a large part of Ciutadella. Other painted lungs of yellow, more modern or in which there has been work in recent years, at least have infrastructure to receive external water. This is the case of Laberint d’Horta, Estació del Nord, Barceloneta and Parc Central de Nou Barris.
And then there’s the color predominant blue, which corresponds to 80% of areas that were irrigated with drinking water and for which a solution must be found. Among them there are the entire Three Turons –Park Güell, Rovira and Peira–, the Castell de l’Oreneta de Sarrià or the Putget, the gardens of Pedralbes and Torre Girona, the Pegaso, Sant Martí… Also half Montjuïc, since half of the mountain uses underground water but the other half does not even have the network to receive it on the surface.
The hard work they now have on the table is, with the resources already existing, how to reach the maximum number of green areas. They will squeeze the routes of the tankers and the trucks to turn as many gardens as possible from blue to yellow. But it is evident that there is too much blue for 28 trucks and parks will have to be sacrificed or left with such a sporadic dose of irrigation that the survival of the flora will be in question. No neighborhood will want its park to be among the nominees.
Three priorities already decided
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Barcelona City Council has already decided three priorities for the emergency phase. Firstly, save the 35,000 trees and palm trees on large avenues and emblematic roads, for the shade they offer, because it costs a lot of money to replace them and to avoid risking another fatal fall like the one in the Raval. The second large group is made up of avenues with vegetation at ground level, such as Paseo Sant Joan or Diagonal.
And thirdly, the city’s heritage or historical parks. These include the collection of roses in Cervantes Park, Turó Park, Costa i Llobera, Pla i Armengol, the Teatre Grec gardens and Trinitat Park. Whether this list of protected areas can be expanded with a good number of neighborhood parks or whether they remain privileged islands in a sea of dry gardens will depend on the optimization of the cisterns.