This Thursday, the Ministry of Transport awarded a contract for 4 million euros to perform a study on the state of the roads and their resistance to floods like those that devastated several towns in the Valencian Community a month ago. The DANA It interrupted land connections with the affected area due to the damage caused to highways, roads and even the railway network. The analysis commissioned by Transport aims to identify critical points and prepare roads for extreme weather events that are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change.
In this way, the contract awarded this Thursday by Transport seeks to evaluate the “resilience” of the State Highway Network with the aim of studying the existing risks of flooding such as those caused by the torrential rains that fell on the Levante at the end of October. . To prevent the damage from being repeated if a phenomenon of such magnitude occurs again in the future, the department of Oscar Puente aims to develop a prevention and response plan for climate changein which the General Directorate of Highways is already working within the framework of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change.
The task is divided into two parts. On the one hand, it is necessary to analyze the flood risks of the road network and the implementation of warning systems. In this sense, the study launched by Transport will analyze the flooding of the roads taking into account additional risks due to climate change and will identify critical points where there is an insufficient drainage system in the face of extreme weather events. In this first phase, information and hydrometeorological studies will be collected, while computer applications will be designed and a hydrological alert system will be implemented, among other actions.
On the other hand, technical guidelines will be developed to improve the management of roads in the event of floods, with the aim of achieve adequate coordination between the different organizations involved in the management of this type of emergency and structuring the necessary actions to avoid or minimize the effects of extreme weather phenomena such as the recent DANA. In this second phase, the aim is to design territorial coordination protocols to speed up the response to emergency situations.
The Ministry of Transport points out that the risks of flooding on roads can occur in two ways. On the one hand, the accumulation of water on the road can prevent vehicles from moving safely and leave certain sections out of service. On the other hand, water can deteriorate structures and cause them to fail.
The contract awarded this Thursday was put out to tender at the end of March and It is financed from NextGeneration funds of the EU Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan. It is divided into two lots: one worth 2.03 million euros to evaluate the roads in the northwest of the country (Asturias, Extremadura, Galicia, Castilla y León, Madrid, Cantabria and La Rioja) and another worth 1 .93 million for Aragon, Andalusia, Catalonia, Valencian Community, Murcia and Castilla La Mancha.