If it were not for a pharaonic engineering work from the 1950s known as Plan Sur, the floods in the Spanish region of Valencia would have been even more devastating.
The heavy rains triggered by the DANA meteorological phenomenon have already left 211 dead in the region. Although rescue teams work day and night, as the hours pass the hope of finding more survivors is diminishing.
Flash and deadly floods destroyed bridges and covered towns in mud, destroying everything in its path and leaving them without water, food or electricity.
And as the Spanish army is deployed alongside local emergency services, many believe the catastrophe could have been much worse.
“I am convinced that thanks to the Plan Sur, the water has not reached Valencia, otherwise it would have and the tragedy would be greater”, Miguel Ángel Carrillo Suárez, engineer and president of the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports of Spain, tells BBC Mundo.
70 years ago, The Turia River crossed Valencia in half, running from west to east. In fact, the city of Roman origin was built around this waterway that irrigated its fields and flowed into the Mediterranean Sea.
With almost 800,000 inhabitants in its metropolitan area, it is the third city in Spain in terms of population after Madrid and Barcelona.
But in 1957 another deadly episode of extreme rain caused the river to overflow its banks. On that occasion, 84 people died, the almost 3 meters of water and mud damaged entire neighborhoods and paralyzed the economy for months.
And the city is located on a plain slightly inclined towards the sea and when torrential rains came, the water sought to reach the Mediterranean through that channel.
“Floods happen every few years. It is a meteorological phenomenon that discharges a lot of rain and as The basins are small and have a slope, the water immediately concentrates and when it exits to the sea and these great tragedies occur,” says Carrillo Suárez.
The mega project
To reverse the situation, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco the State approved a drastic plan: divert the route of the river towards the south and dig a new road of almost 13 kilometers, completely artificial to protect against floods.
To tame the river and carry out the geographical modification, it was necessary to place a type of plug in the natural channel to redirect it to the concrete road with sloping walls and 250 meters wide at its base.
The megaconstruction was completed in December 1969 and today it is considered one of the most important engineering works of the history of Spain.
In this week’s photographs and videos, you can see how the current channel is 7 meters high, channel the torrent of water and withstand the onslaught which otherwise would have flooded the streets.
“We can say that in the city nothing happened thanks to the new channel. I live in Valencia and I am about 500 meters from the construction and everything is fine here. But right on the other side, the tragedy is enormous. That contrast is very shocking,” explains Federico Bonet Zapater, Territorial Councilor in Valencia of the College of Civil Engineers, Canals and Ports.
Like him, many Valencians feel today privileged to live on the other side of the Turia.
A deadly ravine
“The South Plan has rolling dams and probably everything could have been evacuated there without major problems. What happens is that right next to the Turia River there is an important ravine, but smaller, of shorter length, that normally never carried water.”
“That is the ravine that has overflowed because a very intense rain was concentrated at its head. It is relatively small and that causes all the rain that comes to it to accumulate immediately and everything to come out at once”, he adds.
Financed with a postage stamp
With an initial budget of almost 3,000 million pesetas, the work would end up costing twice as much.
A part of the Southern Plan was financed by the Valencians themselves, who when sending letters had to add an extra stamp to their letters that cost 25 cents of a peseta. “We were paying for that for about 20 years,” recalls Bonet.
“Until something like this happens, people don’t realize what engineering works like this are worth. They protect people’s lives – which is something that is priceless – but also land and homes,” says Carrillo Suárez.
“In Valencia in the year 57 People used the riverbed for many things they shouldn’t, such as putting up houses or orchards. They did it because floods happened every few years. So, when the flood came, it took away everything that was there,” says Carrillo Suárez.
The flood of 1957 had profound urban and socio-economic consequences. AND The Franco regime decides to take advantage of the redesign of the river to carry out a large urban planning operation. The authorities decided to completely remodel the city. “A new Valencia” was conceived.
In the 1960s, “Valencia experienced GDP growth of 10%, much higher than the Spanish average and was consolidated as an important industrial metropolitan crowneconomically vibrant and modern. In the middle of the boom, the hydraulic solution would end up being one more piece of the new developmental planning,” explains geographer Iván Portugués Mollá in his doctoral thesis.
The new route of the Turia frees up more than a million square meters of the old channel and the city aims to change many more things.
a new city
Without going too far, its railway network, known as the “iron belt”, divided the streets and the 263 level crossings to avoid the tracks left each year numerous accidents with victims, in addition to many obstacles to automobile traffic.
“Valencia was an important crossing point on the Mediterranean itinerary for passenger cars and trucks linked to port activity,” writes Portugués Mollá.
“The Southern Plan included: the new channel, new railway facilities, new road access, the expansion of the port and sewerage”, Claudio Gómez Perretta, one of the engineers behind the plan, wrote in the Levante newspaper.
In the old channel a large avenue of about 10 kilometers long and an average width of 225 meters. Gómez Perretta remembers that the Champs Elysées in Paris are only 100 meters long. The avenue becomes a “main backbone axis.”
Currently, above the natural cycle of the river, is the Turia Garden, one of the largest urban natural parks in Spain.
It also has the City of Arts and Sciences or the Palace of Music and bridges designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava.
“The southern solution really fulfilled its function, both on this occasion and on previous occasions. Because after ’57, in ’82 there were also significant rains and in ’87. Periodically, the phenomenon of very intense rain occurs, in short periods of time and more or less quite localized,” concludes Bonet.
- What went wrong? 4 reasons that explain how deadly Spain’s torrential rains were
- “Only the people save the people”: the motto of rage and resilience that spreads in the devastated areas of Valencia
- “The government is not doing anything. Only young people are helping us”: the outrage over insufficient help in the tragedy in Spain