27 towns without drinking water in the midst of a heat wave: "We are a dunghill"

The main square of the tiny town of Bovera (Lleida) is called La Bassa (the raft, in Catalan).

The name almost sounds like a mockery if you consider that for two weeks it has been forbidden to drink from its two sources.

Above them, a sign: "Non-potable water", alerts.

Both mouths are wrapped, as a warning, with a fluorescent tape, the same that the police use to cordon off the scene of a crime.

It is not that there has been any in the town, although the feeling among its 230 neighbors is that of being victims of a criminal environmental outrage.

“We are the dunghill of Lleida”, sums up one of them, who prefers not to reveal his name (“everyone knows each other here”, he justifies himself), after happily criticizing the mismanagement that in the 21st century has led to more of 20.

000 residents of 27 municipalities in rural Catalonia have been without drinking water for two weeks due to contamination by herbicides in a nearby reservoir.

A situation that has worsened with the heat wave.

"I have never experienced anything like it," says the old man from the door of his house, who has bought a pallet with 250 liters of bottled water to cook and stock up all summer.

Another neighbor, sheltered in her portal, prepares her van to go to Lleida, 45 minutes by car, and says that she will take advantage of the trip to buy bottles.

Queviures Maria Àngels, the only grocery store in town, closes in the afternoons.

"I have the feeling that this is here to stay," the woman explains in front of her garage, detailing that she has gotten so used to the situation that for moments she forgets.

“Sometimes I brush my teeth, and then I remember [the contamination].

I spit the water out of my mouth in a hurry, ”she adds with the mercury exceeding 40 degrees.

Òscar Acero, mayor of Bovera and apparently the only neighbor willing to speak with his name and surname, asks the Generalitat to declare the emergency zone in Les Garrigues, an empty region of Catalonia surrounded by windmills and fields battered by the depopulation and ageing.

"If this had happened in Barcelona's Eixample, the problem would have been solved in hours," complains the mayor of a territory already accustomed to contamination from the agricultural and industrial sectors.

"I better not speak.

I would say too much, ”says another neighbor tersely as he checks out a tractor in a garage.

It is not the first time that agriculture has risked the water of Lleida.

At the beginning of May, the same municipalities were left without drinking supply for five days after the Catalan Health Agency detected high levels of a herbicide used in the fields that surround the mighty Segre River.

Only two weeks after the first alert was deactivated, the Government reactivated it after again detecting levels incompatible with human consumption in the Utxesa reservoir, which supplies a region where tourist records and their millions never arrive.

“The feeling is of abandonment.

Of course, in a few months the parties will come to campaign for the municipal ones”, complains the mayor.

Last year, another hydrocarbon leak in the area also forced consumption to be banned.

Sources from the Ministry of Climate Action and Agriculture of the Generalitat admit that this problem ("diffuse pollution", they call it) is widespread throughout the Lleida plain and that if this year the concentrations of pollutants have risen so much it has been due to the drought

"As there is less water, the concentrated levels have increased," they add.

During the first episode of contamination, in May, the cordiality between the affected municipalities and the Government prevailed.

But the declaration of another episode was the straw, dirty, that broke the camel's back.

Some consistories have accused this week the Catalan Water Agency (ACA), the body responsible for water management of the Generalitat, of "inaction and apathy".

Last Tuesday, the director of the ACA, Samuel Reyes, responded to the mayors in an interview with the Catalan News Agency that the law determines that the city councils, specifically the Les Garrigues Water Association, are competent to guarantee the supply.

And he accused this body of not having accepted the aid worth 100 million that he offered in the territory to improve potability.

“On top of that, it will be our fault.

It is the Government that has to guarantee that the water does not reach us rotten, ”replies Mayor Acero.

Catalonia has been stuck in bad waters for decades: seven out of 10 aquifers are contaminated, which is far from meeting the objective set by the European Commission of total decontamination by 2027.

The Generalitat does not venture to set a date for the solution of the problem, although it trusts that a change of filters in the water treatment plant will decontaminate the water.

And for the future, it aims to find a new catchment point in another swamp, without contaminants.

Meanwhile, he is chartering tanker trucks every two days so that the neighbors can fill jugs.

The mayors, however, complain that in the midst of a heat wave in some municipalities the liquid arrives at noon.

And between the crossfire of the administrations, the neighbors complain of misinformation.

None of the twenty consulted between three localities know what day or at what time the next tanker truck was going to arrive.

Josep Vives, a 62-year-old resident of La Granadella (700 inhabitants), shows with his mobile a municipal edict that, published at 10.50, gives an hour's notice of the arrival of the truck.

“Do you think my mother, who is 85 years old, has to be carrying bottles in a hurry to go get water?” he asks himself.

"This is third world," he concludes.

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