The incessant work of the last days in Alcanar, Santa Bárbara or Ulldecona allows these towns, badly affected by the heavy downpours on Sunday, to begin to recover a certain normality.
Even so, many establishments and businesses will have to start from scratch, there are many rural roads that must be cleaned and reopened to restore agricultural activity, and there are plenty of potholes and damage to be repaired.
The mayor of Alcanar, Joan Roig, has asked the Spanish Government to include an advance payment procedure for the aid that must arrive with the declaration of an area seriously affected by a Civil Protection emergency in which Montsià will be included. In the primary sector, few effects are confirmed in rice, critical crops, olives or salt.
Once the scare has passed and with the most urgent actions resolved, the municipalities of Montsià affected by DANA on Sunday begin to take stock of this latest episode of torrential rains and floods, the third in five years.
This frequency of phenomena that occurred extraordinarily and punctually every many decades has left city councils out of play, with municipal coffers shaken and strained and with mayors asking for "a change of screen."
In Alcanar, Mayor Joan Roig has claimed that resources must stop being poured into "reactive" repairs when a disaster has happened and that "preventive actions" must begin to be prioritized.
Roig has indicated that, after the floods of 2018 and 2021, the State granted Alcanar aid of more than 5 million euros, 4 million in 2018 (which were not all collected) and 1.5 million for damages two years ago , and that if these resources could have been used for preventive measures, "the impact of this year's downpours would have been substantially reduced."
As an example, he pointed out that it was possible to "expropriate some chalet" from the non-received urbanizations where the ravines pass, as well as land in the Montsià mountain range "to guarantee the passage of water", or "make rolling foundations", among others. "That is the paradox of what is happening," questioned the mayor. "We are not focused on the problem as we should be," he added.
The expense that these municipalities have had to face due to these violent downpours has destabilized the municipal accounts.
In Alcanar, the mayor speaks of "economic collapse" after dealing with "two natural catastrophes" and a third episode that involves repairing 80% of the municipal road network, sinkholes, urban affectations and other damages.
For this reason, taking advantage of the visit of the delegate of the Spanish Government, Carlos Prieto, on Tuesday, he was proposed "a new formula" for the collection of subsidies.
It is "an advance", an advance of the money "direct and quick", to "reverse the process" and that it is not the town councils who pay in advance for the emergency works while they wait for the resources of supra-municipal aid.
"We propose that they give us the money to be able to carry out the repair works and justify them. If there is a municipality that cannot correctly justify the money, then they should return it", Roig exemplified.
The proposal is supported by other municipalities such as Santa Bárbara, where the cost of damage will also be great. The mayor, Antonio Ollés, has highlighted the complications of the procedure when an area affected by a Civil Protection emergency is declared.
"They make it difficult for us because Madrid makes the quantification, sends the money to the Generalitat - which has the powers transferred - and then you must ask again for the same thing that you have already explained in Madrid, but it turns out that the Generalitat's call was much more demanding , and much less things entered.
The mayor has celebrated the Government's commitment to be "softer" with the requirements and is confident that these problems will not be repeated, which he has described as "a bit absurd." "That once you have the money allocated, you cannot take advantage of it and they return to Madrid, that is already the saddest thing of all -as it happened with a part of the 2018 aid-", he recalled.
As explained by the mayor of Alcanar, the decree of the Council of Ministers could arrive in a few days and the Catalan State delegation considered the advance payment proposal because it can be "relatively easy" to include it and make the resources arrive "very quickly" to the municipalities affected.
"It is a substantial modification, but easy to do because in the end they are bases and an agreement between the Ministry and the Generalitat, and therefore, it can be introduced without any problem", Joan Roig has defended.
In both Alcanar and Santa Bárbara, after prioritizing actions to recover entry into the most affected private homes, checking for possible structural damage, detecting sinkholes, collecting destroyed materials, or cleaning streets, work is being done against the clock to guarantee access to the roads. rural areas with basic interventions while they do not have more resources to carry out "finer work of restitution" of agricultural roads.
Although the Unió de Pagesos union confirms that the effects on citrus, rice or olive crops are scarce, there has been a lot of damage to the roads, serious spills on the farms or even trees swept away by the force of the water. Significant losses are also not expected in the salt flats where activity and the passage of trucks through the Trabucador bar resumed this Tuesday.
On the other hand, the Santa Bárbara City Council will be in charge of contracting the work to repair the large hole that the water left between Aire streets, a hole one meter deep by about ten meters wide.
Finally, in Ulldecona, this Tuesday it was also possible to access the shelters of the Sierra de Godall Rupestrian Complex to verify that they have been affected by the downpours. Guided visits to Shelters 1 and 4 have been provisionally canceled because the storm affected a wall of the buildings attached to the Ermita de la Piedad.
The City Council has also suspended the free guided tours scheduled for next Sunday and the concert-performance of the cycle 'Ebre, Art
