In the same way that Catalonia has the habit of exalting a poet, a talk show guest, or even a national invalid, our country is forced to incubate an official misfortune. The nation's authorities know that, in order to unite the people's desires, there is nothing more effective than scaring them. In the last five years, the palm in question was taken by Covid, a little bug that frightened our souls with extra-respiratory psychological consequences that now –stuck in our particular bubble– we are just beginning to glimpse. Like everything in life, the misfortune of the Wuhan plague has expired (although many citizens have been left with their lungs ruined and with unbearable chronic fatigue) and so we have moved directly to the fear caused by the drought. This is also promoted by national television, with a perpetual scoreboard in the form of a clock whose arrow is dangerously approaching the red of water extinction.
But Catalans are inventive people and the administration has begun to work on everything that ecologists had already warned was necessary and urgent during the 2008 water crisis. Now, you will see, the Generalitat will implement (ugh) every possible desalination plant and, if it is necessary to travel to the Arctic to bring us water adopted from the purest ice in the world, so it will be done. The effort is appreciated, but it would be more logical to start what the pretentious call the ecological transition, not by wasting the water we already have. The specialized journalist Montse Poblet warned us at the beginning of the year (citing reports from the company Aqualia, supplier to nearly a million subscribers), that a quarter of the country's large water pipes need deep repairs. Instead of helping Catalan municipalities to alleviate a delirious waste, the Generalitat had the brilliant idea of starting to fine them.
Fortunately, and given that the demands for help in repairing leaks in pipes were approaching a thousand requests, the Govern reacted and the Agència Catalana de l'Aigua has invested 322 million euros in aid (among which are included repairs to municipal piping systems). This servant has spoken with colleagues knowledgeable in the matter and with some environmentalists from the tribe, but no one has been able to specify the exact figure allocated to the repair of leaks and, above all, to the future maintenance of our water network (it helps very little that the ACA, like most governmental entities, has a website worthy of the fourth world designed precisely so that you end up abandoning any human hope of finding exact and/or transparent information). This is a key piece of data, because repairing is healing the wound, but without adequate maintenance, all this investment will be totally useless.
The reader will have to forgive that today La Punyalada is too technical, but all this fuss leads us to suspect that for decades we have wasted – and are still wasting – cubic hectometers (if you add nine zeros, they are equivalent to liters) of water that are lamentably lost, of which we still do not know the exact number. All this is slowly and arduously beginning to become clear in places affected by drought: as you can imagine, in other regions of the State where it rains abundantly, the health of the pipes is not even monitored (following a tradition of the Spanish administration according to which, if there is an infrastructure that is not seen, because it survives underground, then you don't need to worry too much about the matter). Before planning infrastructures that will be built in decades or importing water in a hurry, I insist ad nauseam, perhaps we should insist more on the preventive monitoring of what has already been built.
As in so many other areas, Catalonia can have the elements for maintaining its water distribution system to take care of pipes, reservoirs, pumping stations, telecontrol, and so on, through techniques already established by associations such as the Agrupació de Serveis d'Aigua de Catalunya. But for all this, lo and behold, more resources are needed; much more money, in short. In any case, administrative bureaucracy (which tends to be the twin sister of political opacity) still does not adequately inform us about the level of involvement of the administrations in this regard. Which means that, as I type the end of this article, there are still pipes with leaks expelling thousands of Olympic swimming pools of water while you today are showering with a basin between your legs to save a few liters and thus use them when you wash the living room of your house.