La Guancha has been forgetting for a week. After the landslides that occurred last Monday in the El Roque highway, known as El Convento, of a large stone that forced to cut the road to date due to the risk involved in traveling there, this weekend almost 1,000 residents of the neighborhoods of El Pinalete, Llano Méndez, La Montañeta, Las Crucitas, El Puente, Las Cucharas and, to a lesser extent, Santo Domingo, were without water supply until after noon today. An important figure for a municipality with 5,569 inhabitants, according to data from the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAC) as of January 1, 2021.
The problem arose during the replacement of the meters or flowmeters, devices that record the volume of water that is generated and that are essential to detect leaks almost immediately.
This action is a project of the Cabildo de Tenerife to help municipalities with less than 20,000 inhabitants to avoid losses in supply, which is carried out through the Insular Council of Waters of Tenerife (Ciatfe). With an investment of 2.1 million euros, it includes the installation of 200 flow meters, both at the entrance and at the exit, in 100 tanks in 13 municipalities, including La Guancha, where it began to be carried out a month ago.
According to the mayor, Antonio Hernández, the problem was that devices with a smaller diameter than that of the corresponding pipe were placed, which limited the passage of water and that caused a loss of pressure and a drastic reduction in supply.
Hernández assures that the government group initially opposed the installation of these specific meters, with a size that, he considered, was not adequate, “but the engineer of the company that endorses the project, hired by Ciatfe, assured them that it did not suppose any inconvenience according to his calculations and his dimensions”.
It was on Friday when the neighbors began to have problems with the water supply, with all that this entails: difficulties in being able to cook, wash and go to the bathroom, forcing them to move to the houses of family and friends.
The president was informing on social networks of the steps that were taken in the face of citizen desperation. Thus, he said that on Sunday the municipal plumbers tried to make a bypass to increase the flow, “and even so it was insufficient,” he published. He was also unable to contact the company that set up that installation to try to resolve the problem.
For this reason, “I apologize to the Virgen del Rosario and the neighbors for not being able to attend both the mass and the procession, because I want to be personally attentive to solve the water problem,” he wrote on Facebook. He also included photographs that testified to his work with the municipal plumber.
work stoppage
Yesterday morning, the municipal government made the decision to immediately stop the action and communicated it to the Ciatfe manager in order to install the old meters. Both administrations will meet in the coming days to redefine the project and check the status of the network.
This was also corroborated by the island councilor for Sustainable Development and the Fight against Climate Change, Javier Rodríguez Medina: “The important thing is that there is a will on both sides to solve the problem, improve the sanitation network and contribute to reducing water losses. water, which is the end of the project. To do this, a more detailed study of the network situation will be carried out to prevent similar problems from occurring.
According to the councilor, 32 flowmeters have already been installed and there have only been problems with seven of them due to different reasons. “In the case of La Guancha, it may have happened that the supply network is more branched than what was included in the project, because certain or small actions were carried out that were not recorded and changed its morphology. So your current situation does not correspond to the data that is in the project,” he said. Thus, he adds, “that small change that the flowmeter entails generates load and energy losses that they are not able to overcome”.
