Jorge Salgado.
By Jorge Salgado.
On January 27, President Petro said in Quibdó: “If we said that we were going to build social equality to the extent we can, how come our Government has not taken over the Quibdó aqueduct?”
And he publicly lashed out at the Minister of Housing, City and Territory: “Are we going to wait until we leave? It can’t be, that’s the first thing on the first day of entering a ministerial office, the first thing you had to ask is this: Where are the aqueducts for poor people?
As in a terrible theater scene and after 17 months of government, President Petro recognized that in Quibdó there is no real aqueduct, that the existing one only serves a little more than half of the population for three or four hours a day. day. The rest of the Quibdoseños must survive from rainwater or streams, which implies illness, misery and mortality.
And, hiding what it means to be the head of the executive branch, Petro once excluded himself from any responsibility in this serious problem of the Quibdó aqueduct and unloaded it on the Minister. The way things are going and with the continuous and accelerated general deterioration of Colombia in all sectors (economy, health, education, employment, infrastructure, public services, etc.), the President will seek to continue deceiving using the trap of beating his collaborators as responsible for the town’s tragedy.
gravity aqueduct
The current Quibdó aqueduct was inaugurated in 1942 and was designed for 10,000 inhabitants. On January 11, 2005, the aqueduct was being managed directly by the municipality, through the Public Companies of Quibdó, EPQ, when the national government, through the Superintendency of Home Public Services (Superservicios) intervened and assumed its direction. .
This means that for 19 years the national government has managed and been responsible for the Quibdó aqueduct, which operates through the pumping system from the polluted Cabí river, a tributary of the Atrato.
During the first 21 months of intervention, Superservicios directly and disastrously managed the aqueduct. Then, on November 24, 2006, it handed over its management to ETA Services, a private company from Pereira that worsened the health crisis in the Chocó capital.
Since March 31, 2008, Superservicios handed over the operation of the Quibdó aqueduct to EPM, and, through successive extensions, imposes the conditions of service on it.
Uribe, Santos and Duque have boasted of carrying out a “drinking water revolution” in Quibdó and the rest of Chocó, when in reality the vast majority of the Chocó population suffers from a lack of drinking water, which affects their health, development and quality of life.
Since the Chocó civic strike in 2000, and endorsed in the civic strikes of 2016 and 2017, commitments were achieved with the State and the different governments to build a gravity aqueduct as a solution to provide a 24-hour service to the city. entire population.
Several studies have shown that the pumping system, due to its high operating costs, increased by the continuous rise in energy rates, is neither viable nor sustainable and have concluded that there are multiple gravity aqueduct alternatives for Quibdó, highlighting those that They would use the Ichó River and the Grande River as sources, with excellent specifications due to the physical-chemical conditions of their waters, the pressure head due to their height above sea level and their difference with the location of the urban area, their flow, their proximity, etc.
Petro has not referred to nor has he fulfilled his commitment to Chocó to build the Quibdó gravity aqueduct, the true solution to the issue of drinking water in the Chocó capital, and only almost a year and a half into his presidency he has realized that his government has done nothing about it.
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