The Region of Murcia is the autonomous community that presents the greatest risk for the population with a 100-year flood plateau. If the “flood of the century” occurred, nearly 320,000 people could be affected, or 21% of the total population of the Region. And a third of the total of all of Spain.
More than 260,000 of these 320,000 people live in the capital, the city of Murcia. This flood risk area leads this dangerous record, ahead of cities like Barcelona; while Cartagena, Los Alcázares and Los Nietos come in fifth place, with almost 52,000 inhabitants located in flood-prone areas, according to a report by the NGO Sustainability Observatory.
Biologist Raúl Estévez, responsible for the report, warns that climate change increases the power of the cold drop: “Murcia has not yet had such a strong DANA, but measures must be taken now for when the big flood comes , which will pass. »
“We already have torrential rains twice as frequent and 12% more intense, and the situation will get worse if we do not recover natural ecosystems. But you also have to adapt. And adapting means respecting flood zones,” warns Julia Martínez, biologist and technical director of the New Water Culture Foundation.
Return the territory to the rivers
“Not a single euro should be spent on rebuilding high-risk areas. This money must be spent on relocating public facilities and basic services to safe areas. Families need help to rebuild their lives in safe places, but under no circumstances should what has been damaged be rebuilt in a high-risk area,” says Martínez.
“In addition to fighting climate change, we must adapt. And the only way to adapt is to take the recovery of flood zones very seriously. We need to return part of the land we took from the rivers and not lay a single brick more in flood-prone areas,” he says.
In the capital Murcia, the flood zone covers the central area up to the neighboring Alcantarilla, while in Cartagena the risk is in the urban center. The Mar Menor, the south of Los Alcázares, Los Nietos and the Estrella de Mar urbanization, as well as the municipalities of El Algar, El Albujón and La Unión are also painted red on the map of the areas most at risk of flood.
Three floods in five months
“Measures must be taken, otherwise it makes no sense,” proclaims the mayor of Los Alcázares, Mario Cervera. He knows very well what it means to experience a flood. In 2016, floods caused two deaths. Three years later, in 2019, the city suffered a DANA and had to rebuild after surviving three floods in five months. In October of the same year, the storm was accompanied by an episode of death of thousands of fish, suffocated without oxygen and spat out on the banks of the Mar Menor.
Year after year, “the canals and boulevards have been occupied and there are critical points where the rains fall uncontrolled,” warns the first mayor of Los Alcázares. “You have to be aware of land use and have up-to-date emergency plans,” he adds.
These episodes of cold weather were the trigger for the announcement with great fanfare by the Autonomous Community of a Territorial Development Plan for the Prevention of Flood Risks in the Region of Murcia (POTPRI). Presented for the first time in December 2020, it aimed, in the words of Jaime Pérez Zulueta, then Director General of Territory and Architecture, “to provide a definitive solution to the flooding in the region of Murcia in the area of territorial planning”.
But the Plan ended up being put in a drawer in 2021, after the Community left the call for tenders for the contract to draft this document void. The floods in Valencia seem to have made the Government of the Region of Murcia react, which has now dusted off the situation.
“It is important to emphasize that the powers regarding limitations of uses and activities in areas at risk of flooding correspond to the State and are included in the sectoral legislation of the State. Consequently, POTPRI will be able to establish measures complementary to those established by the Ministry as the competent administration in the management of the Public Hydraulic Domain,” explains the Directorate of Infrastructure Development.
“All powers in terms of territorial management are exclusive to the Autonomous Community,” denies Julia Martínez. “Meteorological and hydrological data are the responsibility of the State, but actions in terms of territorial planning and emergency management are exclusive to the autonomous communities,” he explains.
Green light to build in flood zone
In the Region of Murcia, urban planning in flood-prone areas is a constant. Many things have been built in a flood zone and much remains to be built. This is the case, for example, of Costera Sur, a communication road in the southern area of the Murcian capital in a flood zone with preferential flow: “We are talking about an area that is flooded whatever happens, that means putting people in a mousetrap,” defines Pedro Luengo, spokesperson for Ecologistas en Acción.
“Once you build a high-capacity communication route, you generate a pull effect which means that people do not hesitate to settle there, even if it is further from the center,” adds -he.
The rest of the capital will have even more facilities to build in flood zones. Last April, the city of Murcia was granted the high flood regime. This is an exception to the general town planning rule which will allow construction with a series of requirements in the Preferential Flow Zones (ZFP) of the municipality.
The Ministry of the Interior, Emergencies and Territorial Planning of the Autonomous Community has given the green light to grant this regime, intended for municipalities where more than a third of their surface area is included in the Preferential Flow Zone or which, due to the morphology of their territory, are materially unable to direct their future developments towards non-flooding areas.
The Murcia City Council wanted to send a message of tranquility and claims to verify that new urbanization projects and construction permits comply with the Regulations of the Public Hydraulic Domain: “Urbanization projects are required to: Hydrological study, the effect of flooding and the adoption of measures of all kinds to eliminate the effects of flooding in compliance with the Regulations on the Public Hydraulic Domain,” he lists.
“In the revision of the General Urban Planning Plan, the Town Hall will analyze the impact on regional planning of the mapping of preferential traffic zones, which is what the Regulation on the Hydraulic Public Domain requires. It will take into account all sectoral reports according to the extent of the different skills,” he adds.
A “very extensive” map
In this Community, the fight for building in a flood zone has been in favor of its construction. In 2022, a controversy broke out against the maps of flood zones presented by the Hydrographic Confederation of Segura (CHS). The regional government accused the CHS of having drawn up a “very detailed” plan that paralyzed “all construction in the city of Murcia”.
“What these maps basically say is that the city of Murcia must be moved to another location,” when the then Minister of Public Works, José Ramón Díez de Revenga, uttered these words in 2022, in complaining about published flood zone maps. by the Segura Hydrographic Confederation, he never thought that his statements, far from being a joke, should be taken seriously.
The Hydrographic Confederation of Segura, responsible for producing these maps, has opened an allegation procedure. The construction sector joined the complaints of the Executive, which warned that the brake on building permits led to “very serious consequences”. The conflict was resolved when the CHS opened a process of allegations and, after reviewing them, eliminated 1,601 hectares previously included in the preferential flow zones.
More work, more risks
The biologist Raúl Estévez highlights as a first solution “the importance of taking into account the risk of flooding in the pursuit of urbanization”. And he describes it as “vital” to develop nature-related tools as much as possible to mitigate the impact of flooding. “Reforest and recover as much naturalness as possible from the water canal compared to the construction of large concrete canals, which only serve to accelerate the passage of floods through the avenues.”
Martínez, for his part, commits to respecting eight water control measures, among which “the application of sustainable drainage measures in urban areas, such as permeable sidewalks or filtering ditches, rain gardens or artificial wetlands.
He also commits to “recovering soil conservation and runoff retention measures”: “We have very intensive agro-industrial irrigation systems that expel water instead of retaining it, which increases runoff.”
“We have more work and infrastructure than ever, but the damage is more and more catastrophic,” explains the biologist. “Evidence shows that the solution does not lie in gray infrastructure and that in fact works such as canals, sea walls and breakwaters have negative effects: they create a false sense of security which facilitates and encourages increased occupation of areas prone to flooding. “, he explains.
According to the biologist, this work “sometimes aggravates the damage” that a flood can initially cause: “If, for example, we prevent a river from occupying its bed with a canal and we narrow it with a wall, the water that it does not occupy does not disappear. What happens is that the height and speed of the water increases. This makes him more dangerous.
“There is also a risk of damage being distributed: sometimes, an area has been saved at the cost of flooding others. This happened during DANA 2019 in Los Alcázares, the flood defense works prevented the city of Murcia from being flooded to the detriment of the Vega Baja,” explains Martínez.
Run pending infrastructure
On the other hand, the Autonomous Community requested this week – in collaboration with the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports – of the CHS to execute the “pending” hydraulic infrastructures to reduce the risk of flooding as much as possible.
Some works “are already analyzed and proposed in the current Flood Risk Management Plan (PGRI) prepared by the CHS in 2015 and recently updated in 2021”, according to the Minister of Public Works, Jorge García Montoro, who considered “key” are containment and defense actions such as dams or pipelines.
