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THE COMMENIUS CORNER
This year our school IES FREDERIC MOMPOU takes part in an European Comenius project with the topic called “Water asset”. Our colleagues are teachers and students from Portugal, Turkey, Italy and Romania and from now to the end of the year we are going to put in our web all the news we can get above the topic. To begin we have found an interesting article in our English local newspaper called “Catalonia” (17 September 2004). We hope our readers enjoy reading it. RIVER LLOBREGAT RE-CHANNELLED AFTER A CENTURY OF PLANNING The project takes into account flood prevention and involves the expansion of Barcelona port. AGENCIES/ ALEX LEFF The river Llobregat changed its course yesterday in the last stage of a hundred-year-long project, despite the fact that the works being carried out to divert the river are unfinished, and are not expected to be completed until late next year. The project will also involve expanding Barcelona port as a way to prevent floods. The opening of the new channel yesterday was “ a symbolic act”, as Catalan president Pasqual Maragall put it. The Llobregat flows at an average of 20 cubic metres per second, but that figure has reached 2.000 during floods, which was the case in 1962. In order to avoid flooding, river flow has been raised to 4.000 cubic metres per second. “We are building a large port, which is what the combined productive Catalan and Spanish economy needs”, Joaquim Coello wrote in La Vanguardia newspaper yesterday. “We cannot conceive a competitive exporting economy without a port that is effective and sufficiently capable”, Coello adds. More specifically, according to the same journalist, the port is experiencing an increase of 15 percent in total traffic and 20 percent growth in cargo, making Barcelona the fastest-growing port on the Mediterranean and in Europe. To keep up with the pace, The Barcelona Port Authority has requested an expansion which will include new container terminal by 2008. The act of the re-channelling of the river Llobregat and the subsequent Barcelona port expansion have been heralded as an historic milestone by the local press, pointing out that the extraordinarily slow progress on the plan reflects the nation’s history marked by civil was and international isolation. The plan did not begin in 2001, the year the Llobregat diversion was forecast for 2003. It actually dates back to a plan by the civil engineer García Faria in 1893 . And since then, there has been a century’s worth of proposals, especially in the 1970s.
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