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Is climate change the culprit behind the devastating Valencia floods?"In the past few years, the Spanish government has been removing dams at a furious rate. Under a European Union programme to encourage the restoration of rivers to their wild state for the benefit of fish migration, Spain set about dismantling barriers of all kinds. In 2021 it got rid of 108 dams and weirs; in 2022, another 133. That year, according to Dam Removal Europe, a coalition of seven green pressure groups, it was Europe’s proud league champion at dismantling them. Last year it was second only to France.
Some dams were removed in the hills around Valencia but it turns out they were small irrigation dams, not reservoir dams, so they would not have made much difference last week. However, the failure to build a new dam may well be partly to blame. The Cheste dam in the Turia catchment was specifically designed to prevent flooding, to ‘regulate the flows coming from the upper basin of the Poyo and Pozalet ravines’. It was approved in 2001 as part of a National Hydrological Plan.
Objections from people in Aragon to separate parts of the plan that would transfer water between regions led the socialist Jose Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to promise to repeal it when running for prime minister in 2004. He kept his promise and the Cheste dam was an unintended casualty. Could it have saved Valencia? Possibly. The city of Aragon was saved last month by a dam built by the emperor Augustus.
As it happens, the same question had been asked a month earlier about the floods in North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. The area around the city of Asheville was devastated, while downstream Nashville was fine. Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian climate analyst, noticed a possible reason for this. In the 1930s, after a series of terrible floods, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was charged with building dams throughout the catchment of the Tennessee river, to soak up unemployment, generate electricity and alleviate flooding. It built 49 dams over the next 40 years, including a huge one above Nashville, and the devastating floods of 1916 and 1927 became a distant memory.
But one district rejected all its proposed dams because of local opposition: Asheville. A dozen dams were planned for the French Broad river and its tributaries around Asheville but they were never built. Had they been, it is likely that the floods of this year would have been far less terrible."
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/dam-shame-what-really-caused-valencias-floods/
