The drone flight, always stealthy, starts at seven in the morning in Calafell (Baix Penedès). The road map of the surveillance device, obtaining images of the 2,500 swimming pools scattered throughout its extensive municipal area, with numerous developments. The flights are made in duplicate and the images are compared to check if changes occur. Thus, the City Council, with powers in the management and control of the use of drinking water, can detect if there are neighbors who fill empty pools despite the express prohibition of the Generalitat's Special Plan for Sequera.
The drones get up so early to respect the privacy of the house tenants. At that time, between seven and eight, it is very unlikely that any neighbor is bathing or sunbathing next to the sheet of water, municipal sources explain. If a drone records people in a swimming pool, the images are deleted.
Each drone that rises can cover a radius of half a kilometer with a single operator and complete the sweep in five minutes. “It is difficult to see from the street if the pools are full, and we have decided to make an inventory of the pools that are empty with periodic drone flights to monitor whether or not they are full, and if they are full, proceed to the corresponding sanction”, explains Aron Marcos, Councilor for Urban Ecology, in a video posted on Instagram.
The same mayor admits that control could be carried out by analyzing water consumption, house by house, to detect if it triggers and then check if the reason is that the pool has been filled. The reading of the consumption does not allow detecting the infraction as quickly as through the periodic flights of drones. The bill is also bimonthly and the water meters are not digital.
"The objective is not to impose fines, it is to save water," says the City Council. The surveillance method has been publicly disseminated seeking a dissuasive, almost preventive effect. If the neighbors know that they are being watched from the air and their pool is still empty, they will not fill it now no matter how much heat wave they have to endure, seeing their pool without water. The measure, they insist from the Consistory, does not seek to open disciplinary proceedings and collect fines, but to reduce water consumption in the midst of a drought.
The system has just been launched now, in the second half of July, after completing the administrative process to award the contract to a company specialized in drone flights. If the process could have been speeded up, it would have started sooner, the municipal government being aware that residents have had time to fill their pools despite the prohibition to do so.
It is not the first time that swimming pools have been monitored from the air in Calafell. The precedent is from 2002, when drones did not yet exist and their use had not spread. The City Council then had to contract the flight of a small plane with its pilot to fly over the sea of private swimming pools that exist in the municipal area. The objective, to check if there were unregistered swimming pools, operating irregularly, as the Consistory suspected due to the skyrocketing water consumption in many of the houses when summer arrived.
The measure, with plane flights and a photographer taking images from the air, served to detect some 800 swimming pools that were not listed anywhere, including some of neighboring communities that due to their size and capacity of bathers were forced to hire the services of a lifeguard.
Either by plane, much more expensive and costly, as at the beginning of this century, or by drone, more effective, faster and cheaper, the efficiency of monitoring swimming pools from the air has been proven in Calafell. A method used by other administrations, such as the central government, to detect irregular constructions outside the cadastre, in rural and urban properties, and thus be able to collect the corresponding taxes in each case.
