By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
VIDEO and photos of massive, destructive flash flooding in Spain has prompted disinformation from several quarters, one of them being so-called fact-checkers and the other from people who post stuff online without checking it first.
A week or so after the flooding in Valencia, which is now hitting the Barcelona region, a photo appeared online of a “HAARP ship seen off the coast of Spain”, which of course suggests that the flash flooding was a weather modification operation.
It turns out that the so-called “HAARP ship” is the MV Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan, a floating power plant, owned and operated by Karpowership. In 2016 the ship was sent off from the Hat-San Shipyard in Altinova, Yalova, Turkey to Ghana to supply electricity to the power grid.
Around the same time another report appeared online with a map of the flooded Valencia region showing the sites where dozens of small dams and reservoirs had been removed by the Spanish government.
A Spanish fact-check site tells us that the weirs in the Júcar Hydrographic Demarcation were removed between 2006 and 2021, according to data from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, under governments of various political affiliations.
The fact-checkers, responding to people blaming the removal of the dams for the recent massive flash flood that killed some 200 people, claim “it is not possible to verify what would have happened if the hypothetical world imagined by these narratives existed”.
“However, we can explain that weirs and small dams, not reservoirs or large dams, have been demolished, and they are removed for flood safety, legal obligations, and ecosystem restoration. Not removing obsolete or poorly maintained weirs poses a greater flood risk because it raises water levels in uncontrolled areas and can create blockages, according to two experts.”
The “two experts” are not named, which is a little negligent for a fact-checking site. But as it turns out, the long-winded article eventually reveals that real reason for the removal of the dams is European green policy.
The fact-checkers explain: “A third reason is that removing these obstacles promotes the continuity of rivers and allows water, sediments, fish, and other species to move freely through the basins, as explained by the European Environment Agency. This has a positive impact on water quality.
“These measures also help maintain river ecosystems in good condition and protect biodiversity, as noted by MITECO (Ministry for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge). This benefits, for instance, fish populations, providing both ecological and economic advantages (fishing).”
That is essentially the same green ideology driving the green ideologists who inhabit Australia’s environmental departments and CSIRO, who tell us that it’s a noble thing to “restore” the Murray-Darling river system back to its “natural flows” – not mentioning that natural flows include seasons of stagnant billabongs when the river dries up in drought.
These are the same people who would tell us today not to build a Snowy Mountain hydro system because it “disturbed the ecology” of certain frogs or fish downstream.
And so we learn that Spain’s small dams and reservoirs were removed under the National River Restoration Strategy 2023-2030. This began in February 2023 when the Council of Ministers approved the resolution of the Secretary of State for the Environment dated July 2023.
“This Strategy constitutes the revision and updating of the national river restoration strategy initiated in 2006 whose general objective was to promote the recovery of river-type water bodies in Spanish hydrographic demarcations and to achieve good ecological status or good potential in those that did not meet this requirement, in accordance with the provisions of the Water Framework Directive and hydrological planning.”
The Murray-Darling Basin Authority could not have put it better: Bureaucrats explaining how they are doing a “wonderful job” of taking over the countryside developed over centuries by practical farmers growing food and fibre, and turning it into non-productive “eco regions” devoid of dams and other such “human impostions”.
And regardless of the arguments the bureaucrats throw up, commonsense tells us that flood water flow down gullies and valleys is slowed down by reservoirs and their small dams. Take them away and you have a destructive water racetrack that creates its own dams of debris, including in the case of the recent Valencia flood, cars.
