115,000 cubic meters of sediment have been removed from the Barranquilla pipes in the last eight months

In recent days, from the Mayor's Office of Barranquilla, a report was presented in which the progress of the comprehensive recovery project of the Caños System of the District of Barranquilla was presented.

According to the data of the municipal administration, during the last eight months about 115,000 cubic meters of sediment have been removed from the Mercado pipes, near the Barranquillita sector; Tramposo, which surrounds the La Bendición de Dios sector; Las Compañias, in front of the Barlovento neighborhood, and Caño C, which emerges from Las Compañías and connects with La Loma.

The director of Barranquilla Verde, Henry Cáceres, pondered that this has been “a process that has been advanced with the community, in which we have worked to recover them. This will allow us to move forward not as bodies of water, but as channels, to connect our boardwalk, all the projects that are in the center of the city, but we are not just going to stay in maintenance and cleaning.”

The Mayor's Office also clarified that this comprehensive intervention is aimed at developing cross-cutting actions in environmental education, citizen awareness, communication, as well as actions for the prevention and restoration of the water bodies that make up the system, related to physical, environmental, chemical and landscape of the ecosystem services they provide, and the recovery of their water supply.

The project Integral Recovery of the Caños System in the District of Barranquilla

The project envisages in a first phase the environmental recovery of the Barranquilla pipes, specifically the Mercado, Tramposo, Las Compañías and pipe C, through the location and topobathymetric staking, cleaning and removal of material from the channel of the pipe through the use of cut-off dredges, the use of backhoe and loading and removal of material extracted from the channel of the pipe for final disposal to an authorized site.

According to Jaime Delima, representative of the auditing office of the Caños de Barranquilla dredging project, “the work being done through hydraulic and mechanical dredging will enable a hydraulic exchange between the Magdalena River and the pipes. This will result in improving the physicochemical parameters of water and will have a fundamental impact on the environmental recovery of the river.”

He also specified that the scope of this macro-project initially envisages around 6.5 kilometers in length, with approximately 120,000 cubic meters of dredging, which is important since preventive maintenance of these bodies of water will achieve depths between 2 and 2.5 meters in some points and the increase in the hydraulic section, contributing to the optimization of the flow of the channel and at the same time the improvement of water quality, guaranteeing the integral recovery of the prioritized pipe system.

Martha Perlaza, who lives in the Barlovento neighborhood, where Las Compañías spout passes, highlighted the result of the work, because for her, her family and her neighbors, according to the Mayor's Office in a statement, this improvement in the conditions of the canos will mean a change in the dynamics of tourist activities for both locals and visitors who come to this corner of the city to enjoy the gastronomy, even to think about canoeing trips.

“This will benefit us in everything because it will allow tourism, because people in other cities don't have what we have in Barranquilla, a natural resource so beautiful that our city does have. Now people will find what they want to see in this sector because it wasn't like that before, the water was green and pure mud, but we can already see it clean,” Perlaza said.

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