What were you doing 16 years ago? Were you living here back then? Well if you were, you will remember that it was the last time that Rules Dam brimmed over.

Until now, that is, because all that snow that fell during one of the wettest winters & springs this year has been quietly melting away and ending up in the Embalse de Rules.

This is despite the fact that the dam was desperately shedding water some months back to avoid the water level reaching the work going on with the new pillar holding up the bridge over the reservoir.

This is good news for windsurfers as they will have more surface area to race across and will eventually mean, when its all connected up, there will be no water shortages down on the coast, perhaps.

Now if you take a shufty at www.embalses.net, you can find out how much water there is in every reservoir across the country, just click of provinces and you get a map showing how much water a dam is holding back and what its maxiumum capacity is.

In the case of Rules, yesterday it was at 95% (105 cubic hectometres of its 111 cubic-hectometre capacity). Béznar is at 85% and Bermejales is at 87%, which makes a nice change for the latter because the tower beside the dam is more often than not surrounded by dry mud rather than water. It must have been around 2001/2002 when I last saw it overflowing.

Anyway, the reason that Rules was brimming and water flowing over the sluices was because the staff at the dam decided to close the bottom valve (which you often see gushing out a huge jet of water) so that the water would flow over the top sluices to subject the concrete wall to pressure tests. They also diverted some of the water through the Cuerva pipeline at nearly 4,000 litres per second) which keeps farmers on the coast happy.

So, how much was flowing over the top? Just a piffling 6,000 litres a second, which sounds like heaven for a man with a swollen prostate.

Yet that’s not all because around ten thousand litrres per second reach the Cañizares distributor, from where the water is distributed for human consumption, the Motril treatment plant, irrigation, and aquifer recharge.

But don’t worry about missing the spectacle of the dam discharging water down its concrete face because it could go on for most of next month. So take the time, if you are going up to Granada on the old N-323, to stop at the dam and get a photo… because it might be another 16 years before it happens again!

(News: Velez de Benaudalla, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia – Source: MJ Arrebola)

Keywords: Rules Brimming, Reservoir, Top Slucies, Stress Testing, Snow Melt

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