The socialist president of the CHJ called for a “global solution” in 2022 to avoid the flooding of the Poyo ravine

The same CHJ included these actions as “priorities” inside the Flood Risk Management Plan for the Júcar River Basin District 2022-2027published in January 2023, as this newspaper reported last Friday. But the work they have never been attackedas confirmed by sources from the region’s town halls and the Generalitat Valenciana itself.

Polo is from Titaguas, a town in the interior of Valencia where he became advisor for the PSPV-PSOE lists in 2007. He has worked at the Hydrographic Confederation of Júcar (CHJ) since 2006. In 2018, the year in which Pedro Sanchez was inaugurated president of the government and Therese Ribera She was appointed Minister of Ecological Transition, she became water commissioner of the CHJ. Since February 2021, he has chaired the basin organization.

Miguel Polo participated electronically in the key Cecopi meeting called at 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, October 29. At that time, the flood was already destroying, on both banks, the banks of the ravine, the villages south of the new Turia canal, which protected the capital Valencia.

The overflow of the Rambla de Poyo in the afternoon of October 29 was at the origin of the floods which, according to the latest available report, caused 212 dead. At that time, on October 29, scenario 2 was declared and authorities from all organizations involved in coordinating the crisis came together.

And the torrential rains caused by DANA, located at the head of the ravine, were already then confirming the need to have heeded Polo’s warningbarely two years earlier: “The need to provide the Poyo and Saleta ravines with a global solution that will allow the implementation of structural measures that will reduce the risk of flooding of this important and strategic industrial zone”.

The hours

The flow he had gotten up dry, at zero. But at 5:00 p.m. I was already going down with 325 m3/s water, mud and all types of sediments, rocks and reeds. An hour later, at 6:00 p.m.the flooding was “brutal”, as the CHJ itself recognized in a press release last Monday, November 4, with a measure of 1,725 ​​m3/s.

From 4:13 p.m.in which “declining flow” was reported for the third time in a row, until 6:43 p.m. the flow was multiplied by 100. However, there was no communication to the Emergency Department of the Generalitat of the SAIH (Automatic Hydrological Information System) of the CHJ in the Poyo ravine.

When the body chaired by Polo notified him, by automatic email, it was already too late. The waters fell in a volume of 1,938 m3/s and towns like Paiporta were already devastated.

The accelerated descent of the waters, with these flows, and in a elevation gain of more than 1,000 meters in just 50 kilometers from the canal to the sea, confirmed the need for this “global solution” that Polo had recognized two years earlier.

The water carried with it sediment, rocks, branches, debris and everything in its path, once the maximum level of the channel was exceeded. As a result, localities such as Massanassa, Alfafar, User Benet, Beniparrell, Alba, Algemesi, Sedavi and so as many as 72 were destroyed and drowned in mud.

The document

The CHJ itself and its president had warned of this possibility exactly two years ago. On November 9, 2022, work on “removal of vegetation and sediment” of the canal in the Poyo ravine, in Quart de Poblet, near the Logistics Park of the Port of Valencia, located in Ribarroja de Turia.

The work, according to this internal note from the Confederation, aimed to “improve the hydraulic capacity of the canal” and “facilitate the evacuation of rainwater of the polygon during episodes of heavy precipitation.

In this publication, the president of the basin organization, Miguel Polo, says he is “satisfied” with this performance, while warning that work “reduces the risk flooding of the Logistics Park of the Port of Valence, although it doesn’t end the whole problem“.

According to the document to which this newspaper had access, Polo insisted on the “need” to provide the Poyo and Saleta ravines with a “comprehensive solution” that would allow the implementation of “structural measures” to “reduce the risk of flooding” of this important and strategic industrial zone”.

​The cleaning action was a “temporary but insufficient solution”which was part of what was to be a “comprehensive solution to the problem of flood risk associated with the Poyo and Saleta ravines”.

It is for this reason that Polo highlighted the “commitment” of the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation to resolve the problem, emphasizing that “for months they have been working on two actions to definitively adapt the Poyo and Saleta ravines.”

These two actions were not carried out. The first consisted of a project “Canalization of the Saleta ravine”which was at the time being approved, before the work was called for tender. The second was “improve the drainage capacity of the Poyo ravine in its middle part”which in November 2022 was still in the project phase.

Unfortunately, as mayors like Algemesí deplore today, these projects they didn’t arrive in time.