Watery stuff

Artemio is a heavy set bloke who works for Pinoso Town Hall. Usually he has a big cigar clamped between his teeth. I'd prefer not to commit to giving him an age. He drives a Jeep which, he says, is much better than the Land Rover he used to have but, as you can see from the snap alongside, the Land Rover is still with the team. Artemio's  voice is raspy and, until the second or third sentence, when I tune in, I find him really difficult to understand. Artemio is the bloke you call if there is a water leak out in the street, or in our case, on the track. It's a 24 hour a day service. Should you ever need it the number is 656978410. If the leak is on the domestic side of the water meter then you need a plumber but if the leak is on the other side of the meter you call Artemio. Or rather you call his number. He's in charge of the team and he's not always the person who turns up.

Most people expect that when they click the switch on the wall the electric light will come on and when they open the tap water will come out. In rural Spain that's not always the case. I suppose in rural Scotland it could well be the same. If you live a long way from power lines or water pipes then you're on your own. We have mains water and mains electric but not everyone in the countryside has. People have water storage tanks which have to be filled up from time to time by tanker lorry and lots of houses run off solar power either for environmental reasons or because they have no economic option.

Piped water around here comes as two variants. The stuff we have is drinking tap water. It comes filtered and treated. There is another network of water supply organised locally by S.A.T. Aguas de Pinoso, la Sociedad Agraria de Transformación. That network is designed for crop irrigation but, because it runs in places where the drinking water network doesn't some people use it as their primary water source. I think that it is basically filtered but I don't think it's suitable for drinking. That said I've made tea with it presuming that the boiled water would be safe. I wrote that section without checking the detail. I think it's correct but if it isn't I apologise now.

So, the last time I called Artemio was because I'd cut through a thinnish water pipe when I was hacking out weeds alongside our track. It turned out that it was a pipe our neighbour had laid himself to water his almond trees so I had to ring Artemio back and cancel. The time before that it was the public water supply and the water bubbling up through the soil was in the same place that it has bubbled up time and time again. "It's 30 year old pipe," said Artemio, "what do you expect? It goes time after time and we patch it up time after time too".

Interesting that about the pipe. We had a leak on our side of the water meter the other day. We got the original leak fixed and then the pipe, which is sort of semi rigid rubber, not quite the Durapipe type but not as flexible as hosepipe, sprang a pinhole leak. When I tried a temporary repair with some potty putty type epoxy resin the pipe sprang another leak. When the plumber finally got around to visiting he said that the pipe lasts for so long and then starts to fail; as if it had a sell by date. He also said that the piping which had failed, the stuff he was replacing, was thin walled agricultural pipe rather than the thicker walled domestic supply pipe. From the outside they would look identical if it were not for the blue pinstripe on the domestic stuff. He thought that we may have the thinner walled pipe from the meter to the stopcock in the house. He cheerily suggested that if it were beginning to go it may have reached the end of it's useful life. "Keep an eye on your meter." he said. 

I do check the water meter every week. I've heard far too many stories about unrecognised leaks leading to huge bills. I also pondered the pleasures of house ownership.

Rivers, water and the like

Spain has the highest number of reservoirs per inhabitant in the world. At least that's what it says on Wikipedia. I am always wary of these superlatives. I remember hearing in the UK that NHS Blood and Transplant was the best service in the world and I wondered what their criteria were for that statement. My mum is also the best mum in the world. I bet you, mistakenly, thought yours was.

My unchecked and unverified perception is that it is generally pretty sunny in Spain in summer. It is especially sunny along the Mediterranean coast. I hear it even stops raining in Galicia and the rest of Northern Spain in summer. You might think that a hot dry country like Spain would have water supply problems.

Whilst we have lived here there were, a few years ago, some restrictions on the agricultural use of water. It wasn't a big thing though - we were on the verge of trouble rather than in trouble. The last big problems that I can find reference to were down in Andalucia in the mid 1990s. Given that it is sunny and hot that seems to suggest pretty good organisation of water to me. Maybe that reservoir number information was right. Apparently Franco liked building dams. One of his nicknames was Paco the frog which came from his liking for water. Back in 2001 the Aznar Government came up with a plan that was going to move water from the River Ebro, in the North, through a series of pipes and canals down to the drier, southern, parts of Spain. The Catalans and the Aragonese were not keen on this plan. In 2004 the new Zapatero government shelved the Aznar plans and decided to build desalination plants instead. The Valencians and Murcians were not keen on this plan. The graffiti about the "trasvase," the transfer plan, is still clear on many walls all over this area. The plan also had provision for building another 120 reservoirs.

One of the news items during the periods when it doesn't rain as hard or as often as it should is a bulletin on the state of the "Basin Agencies." These Confederaciones Hidrográficas are generally based on river basins and I think there are fourteen or fifteen in total. The reserves are usually expressed as a percentage of capacity  so, for instance, today in the internal Basque Country the level is 95.24% of capacity and for the Ebro it's 85.84%. Healthy figures. The one that matters to us, the Segura basin,  is at 70%. Last year at the same time the Segura's reservoirs were at 49% and the 10 year average is just 32% so one good wet Spring and we have water to burn. Back in the Spring I heard some chap on the radio being asked about the state of the Segura river. He was almost gleeful about the rain. "I had to open sluices on some reservoirs today," he cackled. "Water enough for three years," he boasted.

The Segura goes through Murcia. It looks like a river there by the Whale sculpture and, when I think about it, where it flows into the Med. at Guardamar it still looks quite river like. Certainly it looks more like a river than the mighty Vinalopó, our most local river and the one which gives geographical names to this region. For most of the the Vinalopó is nothing more than a dirty trickle of water.

Despite being aware of the Segura as a name and even having visited several places along its banks I had never really noticed it as a river until yesterday. That's because yesterday I couldn't fail to notice it. I paddled down it in an inflatable boat for 13kms, watched ducks float by at an impressive velocity and, as I stood in it, I felt the swirl of small pebbles bombarding my legs as they were carried along by the current.

None so blind as those who will not see.