Bariloche has the privilege of being located in an incredible place in Patagonia. The city is surrounded by hills and lakes. However, thousands of The inhabitants of this city suffer constant problems with the drinking water service. Many live in neighborhoods that were built in front of the imposing Nahuel Huapi Lake, but they receive the vital element in small amounts, especially in summer. An irony.
Los service cuts and lack of pressure These are the usual disorders that people from eastern Bariloche have lived with for a long time. Also, residents of some neighborhoods in the southern zone suffer from it, such as El Frutillar. And in the west. There, the inhabitants of the sectors near the Laguna El Trébol have been waiting for years for works to be carried out of infrastructure to guarantee the supply of drinking water to meet the demand of a city that is growing without pause.
Yesterday a group of residents from the eastern area complained in front of Arsa and warned that if there are no answers, in five days they could cut the route.
Every summer the Claims for the shortage of drinking water are repeated. Works were announced to solve the problem. But as happens quite frequently, between the announcements and the execution of the works there is a huge period of time.
The Minister of Public Works of Río Negro, Carlos Valeri, announced in early April that the national government would finance the construction of a water intake in Lake Gutiérrez, with the pipeline, the cistern and the secondary works necessary to supply the neighborhoods of the southern zone of Bariloche. Valeri said on that occasion that the projected water work will guarantee service to 65,000 inhabitants.
The months passed without great news. At the end of last October, the national deputy of Juntos Somos Río Negro, Agustín Domingo, reported that the projected water supply work from Lake Gutiérrez as well as another planned from Nahuel Huapi had been included in the national budget 2023 with items for just over 3,000 million pesos.
Río Negro tried to contact Valeri to find out if there had been any progress in relation to those works, but the minister did not respond. “Regarding the Lake Gutiérrez catchment work, it is waiting for national financing. It is with the approved national budget”, reported from the press area of the ministry in charge of Valeri. They indicated that it is a work with a budget that is close to 1,900 million pesos. They assured that the work depends on the national government. “Nation now has to call for tenders because it comes out with national funds,” they explained.
No person in charge of the state company Arsa, in charge of providing the service in Bariloche, responded to the requirements of this newspaper. However, yesterday, in a neighborhood protest, the regional assistant manager Martín Descalzo appeared, who attributed the problem to the growth of the city that cannot be covered with the current infrastructure.
“The main problem lies in the lack of water flow in the supply to the east. The intake is in the springs (Ñireco stream) which is already inefficient for so much growth that we have in recent years, in the entire eastern zone”, described Myriam Flores from the 270 Viviendas neighborhood.
“We need a solution with a new water intake. It is a project that has been discussed for more than 10 years and has never been implemented, ”she said.
- 39.189
- Arsa currently has users in Bariloche to whom it provides the drinking water service. In 2017 there were 34,523.
He said that the DPA informed them that the project to do the work is underway. But it doesn’t materialize.
“Since 2013, we have been claiming the lack of the essential fluid that is water,” said the president of the neighborhood council of the Las Victorias neighborhood, Víctor Araujo.
“The city was growing, development is coming to the east and there was already a lack of water. With everything that continued to grow, everything was exacerbated and this need is increasingly notable,” he lamented, saying that the only solution “is to build a new water treatment plant for the east of the city.” He admitted that a work of that magnitude will take time.
He said that complementary works were carried out to alleviate the problem in the summer. “And then the La Paloma cistern was built and that helped us a lot, but it’s the only thing that could be built,” he said.
Las Victorias has two cisterns. “But it is a neighborhood that has 1,300 lots and about 800 more will come. In addition to everything that grows around our neighborhood, so the need is important, ”he observed.
During the day you almost always run out of water, you can’t wash or bathe. I have lived in the neighborhood for 10 years and every summer is the same”.
Sandra Lobos, a neighbor of the El Frutillar neighborhood, located in the southern area of Bariloche.
He affirmed that these days of January there was a lack of water in neighborhoods such as Aldea del Este, Las Marías, Villaverde. “Obviously important investments have to be made until this plant can be built,” he said.
He said that they launched an awareness campaign in the neighborhood to avoid wasting water.
“It is important that the provincial State carry out works to accompany the urban development of Bariloche,” he emphasized. Araujo defended the idea of working as a team to have orderly planning. He pointed out that neighborhoods were made “without the feasibility of drinking water, with a hose.” “And the truth is that in Bariloche that cannot be happening,” he said.
“Please take things seriously, get to work because the city needs investment. The neighbor does not want to be given anything, but to be given a suitable service and the neighbor is going to pay”, assured Araujo.
Sandra Lobos lives in the El Frutillar neighborhood and the same thing happens every summer. She said that the house has a reserve tank, but there are two families that live in that place. “During the day you cannot use water and only at two in the morning does it come with a little more pressure”, he explained. “Sometimes I have to go bathe or wash clothes at my parents’ house, who live in the Lera neighborhood,” she commented.
The mayor also claims
Mayor Gustavo Gennuso referred to the problem in an interview with this newspaper. He assured that they are works that the municipality has claimed for a long time. “One is from Lake Gutiérrez and the other from Lake Nahuel Huapi,” he asserted.
He maintained that the projects are in the National Entity of Water and Sanitation Works (Enohsa). “The people of the DPA or Arsa have to understand that I have the same despair as my own neighbors. We don’t see that things are progressing and when you turn on the tap now in summer the water doesn’t come out and that makes all the residents desperate, particularly those who don’t have water and it worries us a lot”, affirmed Gennuso.
- 1.900
- million pesos is the budget assigned by the Nation for the water work from Lake Gutiérrez.
“For this reason, the vehemence in being able to express it,” he raised in relation to the questions he formulated days ago towards the ministry led by Valeri. He said that Arsa “has many works open in the city that you see losing water all day, like Moreno Street, and you start to get nervous. When do we finish this? They have a work there in front of the casino, a well that began so long ago that the pastures are already past the fences. And it is not the city that I want,” said the mayor.
In relation to the projected work in Lake Gutiérrez, he affirmed that there is progress. “The land where the cistern is going to be built, the pumping, has been determined, the DPA is working, he has measured it. There is very little progress, but there is progress, but it needs an injection of funds, ”he emphasized.
“Here we are talking about 1,500 or 2,000 million pesos each of the two works, but the truth is that one alone would alleviate things a lot. The two would already be for the future of the city ”, he highlighted.
We have Lake Nahuel Huapi in front, in the case of Las Victorias, and we have no water; The truth is that it is something not to believe ”.
Víctor Araujo, president of the neighborhood council of the Las Victorias neighborhood.
An emblematic case: the neighborhood that has been waiting for an essential service for 17 years
The inhabitants of the neighborhoods El Campanario, Valle del Sol and Laguna El Trébol have been waiting for 17 years access drinking water service. It is a distant area 18 kilometers from the center. Despite the fact that they live a short distance from the Moreno and Nahuel Huapi lakes, the neighbors do not have an essential service, because the work on the distribution network was not done.
The fight for access to the service began almost 17 years ago. They knocked on all the doors of official offices for more than a decade. They only heard promises, but the problem was not solved. This summer the situation is delicate because there is a prolonged drought. Many families get their water supply from wells, which they extract with pumps or buy water that transports a truck.
Ana Bagnolo, who is a member of the neighborhood council of the Laguna El Trébol neighborhood, reported that a cistern for a typical family needs around 3,000 litres. The municipality charges 2,100 pesos per week for the provision of that amount of water. That is to say that 12 m3 per month demand about 8,400 pesos per month.
In any neighborhood of Bariloche, the cost for the service provided by Arsa is much lower.
He recalled that the backbone network work was done 2 years ago. Reserve tanks and pumps were installed. But neither the provincial nor the municipal government want to do the distribution work to bring water to each of the 170 families in that area.
He indicated that, tired of no one listening to them, in the spring of 2021 they went out on the road to demonstrate and ask for drinking water and fire hydrants due to the permanent risk that exists in an area of abundant vegetation. “We only hand out brochures to raise awareness about the problems we are experiencing and they got angry in the Province and there all communication between the Minister of Public Works Carlos Valeri and us was cut off,” Bagnolo said.
He said that several political leaders went to the neighborhood to make themselves available. But they were just gestures. Even the mayor Gustavo Gennuso “came here to take a picture and told us that he was going to help us.”
The neighbors know that the distribution network demands a million-dollar investment. “But we need someone to do it,” he maintained.
In a public document it was stated that in 2009 the completion of the Drinking Water Network was approved of the Laguna El Trébol neighborhood by decree 162/09. He was even assigned a budget and the loan was approved by Enohsa to do the work.
Between 2010 and 2016, the DPA made 3 public tenders. They are all deserted. “Years later, they informed us that the reason was because the adjustment mechanisms for updating (prices) were not in accordance with the inflationary process and consequently the amounts were mismatched (overdue), an issue that was now resolved,” they stated in that document.
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