Drought Persists in Parts of Spain After Storms
Date: 30-Oct-06
Country: SPAIN
Reservoirs at the head of the Tagus river, which are themselves low, will send 12 cubic hectometres of water to the Segura basin in the southeast, which is even worse off, to provide drinking water for towns there.
A cubic hectometre -- a cube with 100 metre (yard) sides -- is roughly the size of a football stadium.
Two years of drought, the first of them the worst ever recorded, have left many of Spain's autonomous regions short of water and bickering about any transfers the central government tries to impose.
Farming regions in central Spain, like Castilla-La Mancha, are increasingly unwilling to send water to the southeast coast to cover the needs of new homes, golf courses or fruit farmers.
The Castilla-La Mancha government this week won agreement from the two main political parties to stop transfers from the Tagus to the Segura river for good in 2015.
The government said it had invested more than 600 million euros (US$760 million) since the drought began in emergency measures to avoid water restrictions to homes.
The Socialists threw out the previous government's plan to divert water from the Ebro river to the dry southeast and is instead building desalination plants all along the Mediterranean and investing heavily in improvements to farm irrigation systems.
"Despite the recent rain, the situation is still very different from one basin to another. While some areas are suffering from flooding, the drought is still concentrated in the Jucar and Segura basins," it said in a statement.
Those rivers run through the regions of Valencia and Murcia.
Climate change models show Spain is likely to get less rain overall in the future and that what does fall will be more unevenly distributed.