Rainfall Affects Pipeline

Having travelled up and down along the canyon road below Vélez de Benaudalla on a weekly basis, the pipework laying has been making progress, until now.

However, a heavy downfall on Monday night shifted individual lengths of pipe out of position in many case and poured river silt and vegetation into others, causing chaos.

Now, you would think that the Rules dam regulates how much water comes down the river no matter how much it rains, but this flood water didn’t come from the dam but from the barrancos that run into Río Guadalfeo from Los Guájares, which is where the downpour was the heaviest.

The flood water cascaded into the trenches where the double pipeline lay perfectly in place, filling it completely. The damage affected about 600 metres of pipes.

Before the work began, they had hemmed in the river water behind an erected bank of earth (or berm) but the flood water washed some of it away.

Editorial comment: you would have thought that carrying out work that entails digging trenches in a riverbed would have foreseen such a possibility because we are, after all, in the middle of autumnal rains. Never mind.

(News: Velez de Benaudalla, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)

Keywords: Pipelines, Rules Dam, Irrigation Distribution Network, Rio Guadalfeo, Downpour, Flooding, Work Halts

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