A water company employee fills bottles with potable water, in Pozoblanco, Spain. The struggle for drinking water in this village of 18,000 has become a glimpse of what may lie ahead for parts of europe where drought and extreme heat are on the rise. — ©2023 The New york Times Company
IT WAS 10am when the villagers, clutching empty plastic containers, lined up behind the tanker truck of drinking water. A cake shop owner arrived with four big jugs for his pastries.
Workers from a retirement home carried two dozen bottles back on wheelchairs for their wards. And a mother of four loaded her trunk with fresh water to wash vegetables and cook pasta.
“This is a disgrace,” said Antonio Luque, the cake shop owner. “We can’t even wash dishes with tap water. It’s very murky.”
Spain has been blighted by a long-running drought, caused by record-high temperatures in 2022, a string of heat waves in 2023, and almost three years of reduced rainfall.
Throughout the country, reservoirs have been depleted; in the worst-affected areas, they are at less than 20% of their capacity.
Human-caused global warming has made severe droughts such as those in Europe in recent years much more likely to occur, scientists have found.
But few places on the continent have been as badly hit as tiny Pozoblanco, a village of about 18,000 in southern Spain, where the daily struggle for drinkable water has become a glimpse of what may lie ahead for parts of Europe where drought and extreme heat have become increasingly common.
Pozoblanco and 22 other villages in this traditional pig and cattle-farming area north of the city of Córdoba have needed deliveries of fresh water since April, when the Sierra Boyera reservoir, which supplies the area, dried up.
Attempts to alleviate the crisis backfired when the government channelled water from a backup reservoir, La Colada, which had been stagnant and used only for leisure pursuits such as fishing and kayaking since it was built 17 years ago.
It, too, was at a record low, meaning that what little water was left had greater contact with the sediments at its base, where waste from farms and villages accumulates.
A mother of four fills her trunk with drinking water. — ©2023 The New york Times Company
A few days after the reservoir was connected to the villages in April, the water from La Colada was found to be contaminated. More than 18 tonnes of dead fish were cleared from the banks of La Colada by government officials in September.
“When there is drought, the concentration of contaminants is greater, and water reserves can become not just unfit for drinking, but poisonous,” Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, UN special rapporteur on safe drinking water and sanitation, said.
Since April, a fleet of tanker trucks has been deployed to deliver 180,000litres of potable water a day to the 80,000 residents. But the contaminated water is still used by many to bathe and for household chores.
Shana Dooley, 36, an English teacher in Pozoblanco, said she worried about the potential dangers.
Both of her children, one of whom is prone to a bacterial infection called impetigo, have had skin rashes over the past few months. Dooley is also concerned that her younger child might be swallowing the water.
“It’s hard to know if the three-year-old is drinking the water when he’s playing around in the shower,” she said.
Elena López, 41, who lives around the corner from Dooley and is seven months pregnant, is considering using water from the well in her backyard – which she has so far used only to water her plants – if tests show it is clean enough.
It is not just drought the area in such dire straits, says María José Polo, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of Córdoba.
The economic development of the province, where cattle farming either directly or indirectly employs 11,000 residents, has led to greater water consumption than decades ago.
As well as the reservoir problems, groundwater and wells used by farmers for their cattle have become depleted, she said.
“What the province has lost in terms of precipitation over the last 50 years is less than the growth of the demand for water,” Polo noted.
Cattle on a milk farm. — ©2023 The New york Times Company
If precipitation levels remain low this winter, the southernmost region of Spain, Andalusia, could lose 7% of its gross domestic product, according to local officials. Studies have shown that 74% of Spain risks encroachment by deserts this century.
In the village, bakery owner Pedro Fernández, 64, says managing the water shortage has become a job of its own for his staff of nine. Ice-cold water is a fundamental ingredient of bread dough, he explained, and every day one of his employees must collect 250 litres from the tankers.
“If there are long queues, he has to wait an hour,” Fernández said. “We have to plan carefully. We can’t afford to run out of water, and we have to keep it at the right temperature.”
Many residents blame politicians. In September, a group of neighbors calling themselves United for Water organized a requiem for the “dead” Sierra Boyera reservoir. But they say their complaints fall on deaf ears.
A supply of drinking water would be guaranteed, they say, had the depleted Sierra Boyera reservoir been connected to one of the larger – and fuller – reservoirs in the wider region.
“The regional politicians have been promising a connection for 30 years,” said Miguel Aparicio, president of United for Water.
But the project to connect the province to a strategic reserve of drinking water is a giant undertaking. If it were approved now, it would take at least two years to build, according to Polo, the hydraulic engineer.
The mayor of Pozoblanco, Santiago Cabello Muñoz, acknowledges that lack of planning is why the water infrastructure has proved insufficient during the drought.
He and other local officials are now scrambling to reassure the population.
Plans to construct, within six months, a water treatment plant capable of purifying even the contaminated – and diminished – supply from La Colada are under discussion, although funding has yet to be approved.
Without rain, however, Polo said she was skeptical.
“In the short term, they’ve done what they had to do with the tanker trucks,” she said. “There’s not much else that can be done.” — ©2023 The New York Times Company
