On 29th October 2015, the Generalitat Valenciana, the autonomous government of the Valencian Community in Spain, approved by decree the Territorial Action Plan on Flood Risk Prevention in the Valencian Community, or PATRICOVA. Its main objective was to minimise flood risks in the region and to manage them in the event of their occurrence. Its goals included:
-Delimitation of flood-prone areas by means of risk maps.
–Regulation of land use to avoid development in vulnerable areas.
–Prevention of damage through corrective measures.
–Anticipating and adapting to the effects of climate change on rainfall patterns.
The formerly named ‘cold drop’ -a phenomenon that the Spanish Meteorological Agency has renamed as DANA in honour of the meteorologist Paco García Dana, although the acronym refers to Depresión Aislada en Niveles Altos (Isolated Depression at High Levels) -, unleashed all its fury on the community, precisely on 29th October (2024), 9 years to the day since the PATRICOVA was approved. Well, the catastrophic floods caused by this latest DANA in the south of the city of Valencia, the regional capital, have demonstrated the need for that plan.
In fact, many of the affected areas were already identified as flood-prone areas in the PATRICOVA maps. However, the height reached by the flood in several locations far exceeded expectations for an event that, statistically, occurs statistically once every 500 years.
In addition, PATRICOVA also includes several proposals to mitigate the effects of flooding, including:
-Improvements to hydraulic infrastructures, such as dykes and diversion channels.
–Restoration of natural watercourses to recover their absorption and retention capacity.
–Sustainable drainage systems to reduce the impact of heavy rainfall.
Beyond the plausibility of plans such as PATRICOVA, the catastrophic DANA in October shows that they must be accompanied by strong public investment to implement effective and sustainable measures for the management of river basins and to protect the population from climate change.
If you want to know more, you can find all the information, including the cartography elaborated for the PATRICOVA, which is publicly accessible, through the electronic portal of the Department of the Environment of the Generalitat Valenciana, here:
Medi Ambient: Planificación Territorial e Infraestructura Verde: PATRICOVA
By Alberto López, Senior Structural Engineer in the Architecture Department of Amusement Logic
Cover image: Salomé Bielsa – CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
