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Date Published: 26/01/2023

Waterlogged Cartagena road to get much-needed drainage system, but it will still flood in heavy rains

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The Camino del Sifón is slated to get overdue drainage ditches to prevent flooding, but the Council admits there is nothing they can do if it rains heavily

Waterlogged Cartagena road to get much-needed drainage system, but it will still flood in heavy rains

The Camino XIV del Sifón near Los Carbonales, in the municipality of Cartagena, is one of those streets that always floods when it rains, leaving it virtually impassable to vehicles, slowing down traffic to a crawl and presenting a danger for motorists.

Now, Cartagena City Council is looking into ways to solve this problem.

A few months ago they were studying the possibility of diverting the road by an alternative route, an initiative favoured by local homeowners in Los Dolores and Santa Ana. Instead of passing under the bridge with the train tracks – the area that received the most flooding – the idea was that the road would run along a dirt track located nearby.

However, Cartagena Council has ruled this out as the proposed road would need to cross a large amount of land that is not municipal property, “meaning it would have to be expropriated, a difficult and costly task,” according to the Councillor for Infrastructure, Diego Ortega.

So they have gone back to square one and are now considering building drainage ditches along both sides of the road for water to run off. This measure “has the neighbourhood’s support,” says Ortega, and work is slated to begin “in the coming months, once an agreement has been reached with the owners of the adjoining properties”.

However, these drainage ditches will only provide a solution when there is light or moderate rainfall; these types of drainage systems are not capable of withstanding the torrential rains that usually hit the municipality every year, so in these cases, the street would be flooded again, according to the Councillor of Infrastructures.

It is incredibly difficult to find a solution that will work for torrential rains, he says, due to the fact that the properties adjoining the road are owned by the Community of Irrigators of the Campo de Cartagena, with whom the Government must reach an agreement in order to be able to modify the land.

In addition, there is also the problem of the limitation posed by the bridge over which the railway tracks run, which cannot be modified. Nor can they fill the track with more asphalt as this would impede the passage of vehicles. All these impediments have meant that, to date, the local government has not yet come up with a viable project that would provide a definitive solution to the problem of flooding when there are torrential rains.

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