Neighbors draining water and mud from their homes, parking lots and businesses, with furniture and appliances turned into garbage, with roads and farms under the flood, with the crucial intervention of Firefighters, Mossos and dozens of Civil Protection volunteers. To clean up yesterday and try to return to normality, and to evacuate and rescue a dozen vehicles in serious trouble on Sunday.
The images have become a desperate routine in the hours and days after the episodes of torrential rains in Alcanar, the epicenter of floods that periodically punish Montsià. From the interior and the mountains, in the Montsià mountain range, to the sea, following the path of some ravines that bring destruction in the form of downpours.
Three serious floods in less than five years (2018, 2021 and 2023).
They have suffered it again in the La Pau urbanization, next to the ravine that divides Alcanar and La Ràpita, with flooded basements and basements. Or in the restaurant El Racó del Port, in Les Cases d'Alcanar, fed up with being a TV news set because the ravine that flows into the sea next to their business overflows and washes away. Or in the center of Santa Bárbara, or in Ulldecona, with flooding especially in its extensive network of roads, key to the fields.
Between laments and outbursts, a message is repeated among the neighbors: we knew it would happen again and unfortunately it will not be the last. “We are fed up with patches that make the situation worse; they are seedy. The administrations must invest money and do it well”, criticizes Sílvia, one of the residents of one of the Alcanar Platja developments. WhatsApp groups are fuming.
Destruction and shared indignation in Montsià. Feeling of helplessness and doom announced every time the storms at the end of summer discharge more than 200 liters per square meter in a handful of hours. Phenomena that with the climate crisis are and will be increasingly frequent.
As always happens when there are floods in Montsià, the parade of the political authorities was repeated yesterday. The delegation from the Generalitat was headed by Laura Vilagrà, Minister of the Presidency, and Joan Ignasi Elena, Minister of the Interior. They visited the hardest hit areas, talked to some of those affected, hoses and brooms in hand to remove mud (the neighbors) and met with the mayors of the most affected municipalities.
"Climate change is clearly an absolutely palpable reality in this area, but we have a strategy to mitigate its effects with concrete investments that must be made as soon as possible," said Minister Vilagrà.
The Government adds that there are actions that were activated after the last floods by Acció Climàtica and the Agència Catalana de l'Aigua (ACA) that have helped to reduce the effects of the floods this time. "We must continue investing, the sooner the better, and assess the areas at greatest risk," added Vilagrà.
After having suffered three torrential episodes with floods in less than five years, always between September and October, the mayors demand fundamental solutions, but with investments in the short and medium term because the climate emergency is multiplying the DANA, the cold drops accompanied by violent storms.
They also ask that the aid to repair the damage reach the municipalities with greater agility. Now it takes two to three years to collect aid, forcing municipalities to go into debt or prevent them from acting faster.
After spending some very hard last hours, the mayor of Alcanar, Joan Roig (ERC), insisted yesterday on the need to seek structural solutions and courageously pointed to one of the sources of the problem. “There has been a disastrous urban management in Alcanar from the 60s to the 90s, and we are paying the consequences now. What would be needed is to re-naturalize the river flows. Where there were ravines and ravine beds, chalets have now been built, and the water seeks its way and destroys the houses and what it finds in its path. It has happened to us three times in four years and unfortunately it could happen again”, the mayor of Alcanar in El món told RAC1. "The situation is extremely serious, and luckily we have not suffered any personal injuries," he added.
The problem, of a dimension that surpasses the municipalities and their technical and economic resources, raises the problem of expropriations. The City Council proposes the creation of a table of experts in urban planning, meteorology and hydrology to seek technical solutions. “We are talking about possibly expropriating fifty or more chalets, regaining the natural flooding spaces that existed before the chalets were built. The water comes down from the mountains, is channeled through the ravines and reaches the sea, but now there are houses and streets”, warns Roig.
President Pere Aragonès also spoke in an interview on TV3 about the problem that is being dealt with Alcanar. For the head of the Government, it is necessary to think about "palliative" measures and others "more structural, contemplating different scenarios, but in a consensual manner." For Aragonès, moving people from his houses (expropriations) should be "the last option."
The magnitude of the latest floods does not have the catastrophic dimension of the downpour of 2018 or 2021, but it occurs in practically identical circumstances. The worst thing is that affected residents and municipalities know that they will be repeated if no action is taken in depth. The solution is to execute at once a global plan with structural actions, of urban significance. They agree on what, how is another story.
One of the big problems, the most complex to face, is that there are a part of the buildings in flood-prone areas, as is now evident with the torrential rains and the ravines that collect water from the mountain, in the Montsià mountain range. They are houses that were built decades ago, in the midst of the chaotic urban growth of the 70s, 80s and 90s. Until now, no one had dared to propose the elimination of inhabited houses. There are those who have bought their house in the affected area in recent years, without suspecting anything, and have encountered the last three floods.
Added to the substantial and annoying material damage is the anguish of spending hours glued to the cell phone and the media, with messages from Civil Protection ordering confinement on Sunday at eight in the morning and advising to go up to the highest floors of the houses.
Minister Elena highlighted the proper functioning of the system for sending massive alerts to mobile phones, ordering the confinement of the 9,600 residents of Alcanar. She also positively valued the activation of the Inuncat plan, which put the municipalities on alert. "We have an emergency system that works," she said from the disaster area.
"We thought we were dying," said one of the residents of one of the Alcanar Platja housing developments yesterday, the area most affected on this occasion. The story of her, shocking. The force of the waterspout destroyed his garden with a swimming pool and blocked all the exit doors of the house for more than an hour, while water was entering.
“We have a serious problem. I suffer for personal damages, for what may happen. It is a warning and we are scared, we suffer for the people”, the mayor of Alcanar is sincere.
