The Extraordinary Assembly of the Island Water Consortium approved this Monday, by majority, the reasoned request to the Island Water Council for the declaration of water emergency in Lanzarote and La Graciosa, protected by article 107 of the Canary Islands Water Law.
The request, endorsed by the technical-legal report presented by the Consortium, was supported by the Cabildo and the City Councils of Arrecife, Teguise and Tinajo, the abstention of Yaiza, and with the absences to the Assembly of the mayors of San Bartolomé, Tías and Haría.
“The conclusions of the report clearly indicate that we are at a critical moment and that the supply of drinking water to the people of Lanzarote and Graciosa is in danger. Faced with this scenario, immediate action is required from the political class,” said the president of the Cabildo and the Water Consortium, Oswaldo Betancort, who thanked the four mayors for attending the meeting and their contributions to the measures that can be adopted by the city councils in terms of savings in municipal public services.”
For his part, the Minister of Water and Vice President of the Consortium, Domingo Cejas, regretted the absence of the socialist mayors “given that today only the report on the critical situation that the island is going through in terms of water was being presented and transferred to the Island Council, which is the competent body for the declaration of emergency.” Cejas also highlighted that “all the mayors present congratulated the manager of the Consortium, Fernando Fernández, for the content and rigor of the report presented, which perfectly defines the water emergency situation in Lanzarote and La Graciosa.”
The proposed measures
The Consortium proposes that the measures to be undertaken be aimed at increasing the production of desalinated water, reducing losses in the distribution network and promoting savings through the restriction of consumption by public administrations and citizens.
“The declaration of water emergency will allow reducing the bidding times for works, accessing financing from different administrations and speeding up administrative authorizations and subsidy lines,” according to the president of the Consortium, who recalled that “since the beginning of this Legislature, the Water Consortium has been updating and drafting new projects to improve the integral water cycle that contemplate investments exceeding 46 million euros.”
To increase production, the Consortium proposes two specific actions at the Díaz Rijo Desalination Plant: the recovery of the damaged frame of 10,000 m3/day from the Lanzarote III treatment plant, as well as the rehabilitation of the fourth frame of the Lanzarote IV plant with a production capacity of another 6,000 m3/day.
At the same time, and on a provisional basis, administrative procedures will be launched, as a matter of urgency, for the rental of portable desalination plants, and a boost will be given to the expansion, improvement and tertiary systems of the WWTPs (Wastewater Treatment Plants), destined for the agricultural sector, which is assured of supply for the maintenance of agricultural activity.
For the control and reduction of losses in the network, actions are established for the implementation of the sectorization and leak control plan, whose project has already been drafted by the Consortium pending its bidding, just as the specifications are already prepared for the signing of a framework contract that will reduce the bidding times for the execution of the works by half.
In the area of savings, criteria are established to limit the consumption of public uses provided by the City Councils, such as restrictions on beach showers, ornamental fountains, street cleaning or watering of public gardens. In this section, the mayors have stated that such restrictions should affect cleaning services and garden maintenance as little as possible, and explained the specific circumstances of each municipality so that these measures do not imply a deterioration of services to citizens, maintaining, for example, an adequate service for cleaning in waste container areas or ensuring the irrigation of palm groves. “Circumstances of each municipality, which, according to Domingo Cejas, the mayors of Haría, Tías and San Bartolomé did not have the opportunity to raise.”
It is also intended for public buildings and facilities to install flow economizers in taps, reduce the opening time of automatic push buttons, which should be double flush, and reduce the capacity of cisterns, among other economizing and exemplary proposals for the population.
It is also proposed to return to the culture of water through the recovery of cisterns and alcogidas through the development of subsidy lines and incentive plans for the recovery of private storage systems in houses and buildings. Initiatives that would be expedited when processing permits thanks to the declaration of water emergency.
Once the Consortium's request to the Island Water Council, the competent entity for the declaration, is formalized, this body, made up of 36 members from all political, administrative, social and economic spheres, will adopt the emergency declaration agreement, after a public information procedure for a minimum period of five days, by inserting an announcement in the Official Gazette of the Canary Islands and in one of the newspapers with the widest circulation on the island.
Avoid shortages
The legal-technical report presented by the Consortium to protect the declaration of water emergency takes a snapshot of the situation of the integral water cycle from all areas: production, networks, distribution...
According to the document, there are factors such as the increase in the de facto population and the accommodation offer (which is around 100,000 tourist places), or the current food sovereignty policy, which implies a greater development of the primary sector, which have increased demand while the production of resources has suffered a decline in recent years. It is vital in this sense, the report says, to balance this negative balance to avoid shortages.
The structural meteorological drought, with a progressive decrease in average annual rainfall, and the successive waves and episodes of heat outside the summer season have aggravated the situation.
And as has already been made public, the Island Network does not carry out efficient management as it supports a level of globalized losses well above what is admissible, with NRW (Non-Registered Water) values above 54% that affect the state of undersupply of the service.
Weaknesses throughout the integral cycle
In the review that the report makes of the integral water cycle, it is highlighted that the current total nominal capacity in the two desalination centers on the island is 86,000 m³/day; the Díaz Rijo desalination center has 68,000 m³/day and the Janubio center has 18,000 m³/day. However, at the Díaz Rijo Plant, production has seen its nominal capacity reduced by up to 10,000 m3/day as a result of the decommissioning of two frames, one in 2021 and another in July 2023, due to the poor safety condition in Lanzarote III.
In the islands of Lanzarote and La Graciosa there are approximately 1,800 km of pipes installed that make up the total of the distribution and transport networks of consumption and regenerated water, of which approximately 1,500 km are supply networks and the other 300 km are regenerated water networks.
According to the databases of the operator Canal Gestión Lanzarote, the age of the networks is one of the greatest deficiencies of the system since 67% of the networks are more than 40 years old, 19% are between 15 and 25 years old and the remaining 14% are less than 15 years old. That is, 67% of the network is very old, according to the Consortium's report.
Regarding transport pipes, the situation is very similar to that of the distribution networks and therefore its renovation is equally necessary. In this case, it is not only considered necessary due to a matter of durability, but also the capacity is not sufficient for a correct supply.
According to Canal Gestión reports, more than 60,000 breaks have been repaired in the last 6 years. A percentage of that amount are located with leak detection plans, but the high rate of losses shows that they have been ineffective.
In relation to water storage, in 2013 there were 53 reservoirs available, with a storage capacity of 132,936 m3, while since 2016 only 47 of them are in service, with a storage capacity of 89,116 m3.
In 2015, the new Zonzamas reservoir of 30,000 m3 was put into service, but the Maneje reservoir (January 2016) of 60,000 m3 was removed due to serious structural problems.
And all these deficiencies have led to the application at this time of restrictions in the supply, selective and controlled cuts in water supply and the temporary paralysis of requests for new connection points. 164 drinking water connections and 54 regenerated water connections have been denied.
Regarding water purification, there are currently 8 wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), of which only 4 have tertiary treatment for the production of regenerated water.
Most of the WWTPs are 20-25 years old or older, and due to the time elapsed, some have become undersized, as is the case of the Arrecife WWTP, the Playa Blanca WWTP or the La Santa WWTP, and others have obsolete or inadequate technology that considerably affects the process, as is the case of the Haría and Órzola WWTPs.
Today, numerous restrictions are applied to farmers of regenerated water in the central area who irrigate according to a very reduced calendar, and only if water is available. In summary, the supply of agricultural irrigation in the territory is in an extremely critical situation, given that irrigation is mainly produced with desalinated water as there is no separate independent network, nor is there a regenerated water network, according to the report of the Water Consortium of Lanzarote.