Page 44 - FCC-N10-eng

Place
The
A century of stories
about Barcelona’s
underground
It’s been one century since the frst cleaning
and maintenance contract was awarded
for Barcelona’s underground by the local
government to FCC; one hundred years of
work, anecdotes, stories, and people.
One of the company’s frst innovation for
the effcient management of the city was
the design and construction of a cart
known as “la patented” which, thanks to
a water-proof box enabled the transfer of
waste without bad odours from the sewer
to the harbour of Barcelona from where it
was then loaded on a boat and dumped in
the high seas.
The frst cleaning systems were based on
the use of workers’ brigades, up to thir-
ty operators, who had to walk from the
company’s facilities to their work site ca-
rrying their cleaning tools.
Work was performed this way until the
1970s when the frst mechanical equipment
was used for cleaning with water under
pressure. It was also at this time that waste
was no longer dumped in the sea and was
treated and eliminated in waste treatment
facilities and in authorized landfll sites, a
great technical and sanitary step forward.
In that decade, personnel no longer had to
walk to their work sites and started to use
their own special vehicles with containers.
Each brigade had a foreman, two supervi-
sors and 11 labourers. The sewer network
was broken down into 12 districts and each
of the 12 workers’ brigades was assigned
to one of these working on various round-
the-clock shifts.
Today, there are 250 workers, including
project and cleaning staff, which provide
services to Barcelona’s underground. All
are very young and include only three wo-
men due because of the diffculty of this
work where pathologies are quite frequent,
such as arthritis and injured knees. The
sewer takes its toll; they told us when we
met at their normal place of work: the sewer
in the city’s Ensanche district.
During this underground adventure, we
were lucky to meet Josep Tárraga, the
head of the sewer department and Paulino
Romero, who is the supervisor Raúl, José,
Jesús, Indalecio, Luis, Juan Antonio, Jor-
di, Raquel and José Antonio, who told us,
while we visited the galleries, that the Bar-
celona sewer network was 1,630 Km-long.
“Each day we clean an average of 1.5 km
and collect an average of 80 tons of sludge.
When it rains heavily, the service is modi-
fed and we handle other tasks which don’t
require working inside the sewers; that is,
we perform work above ground, such as
cleaning pipes, gates, etc”.
“Besides maintenance, cleaning and ins-
pection work at the sewer system, we
perform other types of work, such as the
installation of optic fbre throughout the city
since it uses the sewer network for channe-
lling”, they added.
Barcelona’s
sewer network currently
spans 1,630 kilometers
and 5,000 tons
of sludge are removed
each year.