The transport of water by boat, now agreed by the administrations as an extreme solution due to the drought is not a new circumstance. In May 2008, the Catalan capital welcomed a fleet of tankers designed as a further contribution to alleviate the shortage of resources. At the beginning of that year, the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), a body attached to the Generalitat, made a forecast to contract 190 trips for a value of 53.453 million euros, which means that each trip by boat it had to cost 281,331 euros. However, the miraculous arrival of rains that same month forced a change of plans and the sea supply was interrupted. In the end, only 24 trips were completed, which cost 17.159 million euros; more than half of that amount was paid to the shipping companies as compensation for the termination of the contract. The result is that in the end each boat trip cost 714,977 euros.
The Generalitat decided at the beginning of 2008 to resort to the transport of water in ships after realizing that the Ter and Llobregat reservoirs were close to 20% capacity, which led to the entry into emergency and the announcement of domestic restrictions for the end of summer.
To organize the transport of water, the ACA looked for water resources in the flows of the mini transfer of the Ebro in Tarragona and in the potable waters of the Rhone canals. For this reason, he formalized three contracts with the company Agbar, so that a scale operation of six ships was scheduled on three routes: one from Tarragona (from the mini-transfer of the Ebro to Tarragona) and two to capture the water of the Rhone (from the Philippe Lamour channel), which departed from the ports of Marseille and Lavéra. They had to sail two ships for each route, with the forecast to transport 4,977,570 m3.
Therefore, it was thought to transport, on average, ships with a load of 26,000 m3. It is now being considered to bring a boat every day with 20,000 m3 from the Sagunto desalination plant, and councilor David Mascort does not rule out a second supply point.
As of May 2008, maritime supply began; but the rains began to fill the reservoirs and all this radically changed the availability of water resources for the urban supply. Thus, on June 6, 2008, the director of the Catalan Water Agency decided to terminate the contracts. And, once they were definitively settled, the total costs rose to 17,159,450 million euros (VAT not included). Practically half of that sum that taxpayers paid was due to the penalty for early termination of contracts (€8,965,716), while the cost of water in the strict sense rose to €7,238,172 euros and the rest went to rents, fees, analytics, surveillance laboratories (a little less than a million euros). All expenses were borne by the ACA. There were no contributions from the State desalination plants.
In total, 24 trips were made (18 from Tarragona and 6 from Marseille) and 527,712 m3 were transported, which is the equivalent of one day's water consumption in the first metropolitan area of Barcelona (understood as the 23 municipalities served by Aigües de Barcelona, where 2.9 million people live). In this first metropolitan area, around 500,000 m3 of water are consumed per day.
How many people can a boat supply water to? Each ship with a load of 20,000 cubic meters like those announced now could provide water for the equivalent of 4% of the population of this first metropolitan crown (2.9 million people).
Meanwhile, the port of Barcelona, with resources from the ACA, will carry out works to expand the infrastructure that allows water to be unloaded from ships and injected into Aigües de Barcelona facilities. The current connection allows 10,000 cubic meters per day to be unloaded, through the head, which is half the water that a ship would bring from the Sagunto desalination plant, as Ser reported yesterday. The aim of the work that will be carried out on the emergency route is to multiply this amount by four and allow the volume of water that two ships can disembark every day.
