Actually, it has rained a lot in the past few days in Catalonia-enough for the region's environment minister, Francesc Baltasar, to liken the region to a person who is sick but getting better."We have left intensive care and been taken to an ordinary ward, but we are still in the hospital," Baltasar said. The restrictions will be lifted Friday, he said.Because of the recent rains, the Catalan Federation of Commerce pressed for a delay in using ships to bring in water, saying this should only be a last-ditch resort. To do so now is alarmist and makes the city and region look bad, it said."You can understand a boat bringing water to an island, but not to a continent," the federation's secretary general Miguel Angel Fraile said.The crisis is the latest in a string of embarrassments for Catalonia. Last year sink holes delayed construction of a high-speed rail line from Madrid to Barcelona, and other engineering problems with it shut down commuter rail lines for days. In July, a blackout left 350,000 people in Barcelona without power for three days.Now Catalonia is buying extra water, even from France; some of the emergency ships will come from Marseille.The tanker that arrived Tuesday after a four-hour voyage from the Spanish city of Tarragona further south was carrying 5 million gallons of water, enough to fill about eight Olympic-size swimming pools and meet the daily consumption needs of 170,000 people.Water is a perennial source of tension among Spain's regions.Last month, when Catalonia reached agreement with Spain's central government on transferring Ebro River water to Barcelona through a pipeline, other regions cried foul.The loudest complaints came from two parched southeast regions, Valencia and Murcia, which depend heavily on tourism and agriculture.They had been scheduled to benefit from a permanent and much larger diversion of water from the Ebro, but were shut out when Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero took power in 2004 and scrapped the plan, calling it too expensive, environmentally unfriendly and a bad way to manage a scarce resource.Ecologists say Spain's agriculture sector, with out-of-date irrigation systems and crops that need disproportionate amounts of water, uses up to 70 percent of the country's water.They add that a tourism model based on huge resorts and golf courses is also unsustainable.
As in the days of Noah....