The recent discussion on increasing the radius of protection of water use rights, which has taken place at the National Congress, with “special emphasis on committees or cooperatives of drinking water l”, whose access to water is being threatened by the effects of climate change and competition with industrial and agricultural activities, is an example of how administrative measures for water management are discussed without being at all connected with the technical aspects of this operation. This proposal, in our view, deepens a conceptual error that has been dragging into our legislation for many years and again omits important aspects that must be incorporated into the same legislation.
The proposal proposes to increase the protection radius of groundwater catchments from the mythical 200 meters to an impressive 1000 meters. Why do we say mythical,’ because there is no technical sustenance to set a protection radius of 200 meters, and of course less than 1,000 meters. This criterion is fixed in a slashed way for any type of groundwater capture, regardless of whether it is a three-meter Ferris wheel that captures 1 liter per minute or a deep well 200 meters deep that captures 100 liters per second. In the first case the area of influence of the well can be of a few meters and in the second case several kilometers. This practice of arbitrarily fixing a protection radius without considering the hydraulic characteristics of the uptake puts both cases at the same level, which is absurd from the point of view of hydrogeology. What’s more, there are cases as ridiculous as a sanitary company that could not legalize a city’s drinking water well because there was a neighbor who had a Ferris wheel to water the yard 190 meters away. Passing then, and arbitrarily, from 200 to 1000 meters exacerbates this conceptual error.
On the other hand, and this is important to note once again, in the current legislation, a protection radius is fixed only in order to ensure the rights of water use of a holder, prohibiting within 200 meters from another right holder install similar works to draw water, and no measure is considered at all to seek to protect the quality of groundwater that is extracted from that well. And this look is kept in the bill. Going back to the example of health care, once it had negotiated with the neighbor (who renounces the protection area), he could perfectly install a service center on his turf, and nothing protects against future contamination from spills that occur in the service and affect the drinking water well. Throughout many land walks, we have found the existence of polluting sources next to wells of rural drinking water, without anyone worrying. Hence it is urgent to protect drinking water, and indeed if we think about the reality of the rural world, but it must be done in the right way. The proposed standard only prevents the installation of works to extract water, now within a fixed radius of 1000 meters, but without advancing towards real protection of water quality.
The comparative legislation speaks of well protection areas, which are areas (variable) where land use is regulated, with prohibitions and other precautionary measures, to prevent polluting activities in the environment of water collection including wells or stings.
Isn’t that where the idea of the 1000 meters comes from, and someone got confused?
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