The public company in charge of water management on the Costa del Sol, Acosol, has concluded the work to unblock the integral sanitation pipes in the area of the district of Las Chapas, in Marbella, restoring the service in its entirety after the damage caused by the storm surge that took place three weeks ago, as well as claiming the urgent need to “change the location of the conduits” of the same as reported this Thursday by the company.
From Acosol they have specified that the storm that occurred between 18 and 20 of last November has aggravated the situation of the sanitation collectors responsible for transporting wastewater to treatment plants, since erosion and lack of natural replacement of the sand on our beaches leaves exposed pipes that were installed more than 50 years ago more than 50 meters from the breaker, and today they suffer defenselessly from the force of the waves.
This situation caused that during the recent storm “almost 350 meters of pipes and their manholes will disappear from the beach of San Pedro “, have indicated from the public company, which generated “water discharges” from Puerto Banús, Nueva Andalucía and the Sampedreño nucleus during the week that it took install a bypass provisional emergency that is currently operational and that it will continue like this while Acosol projected and executed by the Junta de Andalucía the definitive solution, according to the commitment made public by the delegate of the Andalusian government, Patricia Navarro.
Similarly, they have pointed out that in the area of Las Chapas “the storm started manholes from the sewer system managed by Hidralia, who were next to the riverside wall and who had never before suffered the onslaught of the waves, but who, given the disappearance of the beach, were at their mercy ”. This caused “the entry into the pipes of large quantities of sand until collapsing two sections of more than 100 meters of the collector -one meter in diameter- that transports the wastewater from the entire urban center of Marbella and the urbanizations to the La Víbora treatment plant, which also caused discharges ”.
Thus, from Acosol they have highlighted that for their technical and operational services “It has been 17 days of work in a row, shifting teams without rest, with trucks and staff working on the beach, sometimes with the waves on top, until get all the sand out of the pipes and restore the passage of water to the treatment plant ”.
For this reason, they have remarked that “once again the urgent need to relocate integral sanitation pipes, built in the seventies of the last century on the same beach, with criteria that today would not be valid and that do not conform to the current Coastal Law, with manholes that coexist every summer with beach users and tourists who visit us “.
As they have recalled from the public body, “These works are included in the different Hydrological Plans since 2009 and were declared of General Interest of the autonomous community in the Agreement of the Governing Council of October 26, 2010 ”.
In this way, they have indicated that “once the project has been tendered by the Andalusian government, A great agreement will be necessary between the municipal administrations, the Mancomunidad -manager of the infrastructures through its company Acosol- and the Junta de Andalucía to execute the works in the shortest possible time and with new criteria that avoid spills due to overflow, using retention tanks and regulated spillways as fundamental elements for network management ”. In addition, they have remarked that “without these infrastructures, the sun and beach tourist destination offered on the Costa del Sol could be negatively affected”.