Turisme Comunitat Valenciana decides to relocate the water pumping stations scattered along the coast that suffer enormous damage in extreme storms and serve bathers
Turisme Comunitat Valenciana is going to start relocating the pumping stations that deliver water to the Lavapies of the beaches as a measure of adaptation to the climate change and the rise in sea level. The initiative seeks to avoid repeated replacement works in each new storm, putting an end to “a continuous and sterile economic cost.” The infrastructures, now in the maritime-terrestrial public domain, would be located on municipally owned land in areas close to the sandbanks.
The strategy will start with the withdrawal of nine facilities on seven beaches in Valencia and Alicante for the time being. There are two in Port Saplaya (Alboraia), El Perelló, Mareny Blau and Motilla (Sueca), Miramar, Piles, Bellreguard and Arenales de Sol (Elx). It will be replicated in the rest of the infrastructures scattered throughout the coast, around forty-five. Each one provides service to about eighteen or twenty showers on average, so it could reach about nine hundred in total. In this case it is about one hundred and fifty lavapiés. This first intervention is budgeted at half a million euros.
Most of these endowments are located in the public domain area and half-buried in the sand. The floods caused by extreme events cause damage to the water catchment systems. An increasingly frequent situation, hence the need to vary the current locations. Each pumping station will require its own individual project, either under the sand or above ground.
Intense weather events seriously affect electrical installations, motors and control panels, preventing their normal operation, with considerable economic damage. And also with a shorter return period. In parallel is the lack of service for users and tourists.
The financing will be provided by the European Union Next Generation EU funds through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. In any case, the authorization of the municipalities is required for the use of the land.
The beginning of the conversion
According to Francesc Colomer, Regional Secretary for Tourism, this is “one of the contributions we are going to make to the adaptation of destinations to climate change”. “We think that a lot of thought is being given to this issue but that it is now time to take real steps in terms of transformation”, he indicates. It is a commitment, in the words of Colomer, “in clear harmony with the Next Generation funds”.
“The initiative aims to preserve the infrastructure to get out of the loop created by meteorological phenomena in recent years and which entails a permanent condemnation of doing and undoing,” he explains. “It is a strategy linked to excellence and sustainability,” she remarks. In short, it is the beginning of the reconversion of the beaches in the face of the new reality of global warming. Tourism will be one of the sectors most affected by deseasonalization and damage to frontline staff.