Civil Protection lifts the restrictions, but defends itself: "There was a high probability"

BarcelonaThis Wednesday at noon, the government's main restrictions were lifted in anticipation of a storm for the early hours of the day. The measures were lifted after no major damage caused by the rains was recorded. The Alt and Baix Penedès, the Garraf, the Baix Llobregat, and the Vallès Occidental had a red alert for intense rains which, in the end, were not as strong as the meteorological models had initially indicated. Faced with this scenario, around 12 noon, Civil Protection announced that it was lifting mobility restrictions and also the suspension of non-urgent health activities for these territories.

This was explained by the deputy director of Civil Protection, Imma Solé, and the head of forecasting at the Meteorological Service of Catalonia (Meteocat), Santi Segalà, in a press conference after assessing the rain episode with the technical committee. In this meeting, they decided to lift the measures regarding mobility and health activity, while others, such as the resumption of classes in schools, remain in place until 5 p.m., as planned, because they consider that at that time there would not be enough time to resume activity.

Solé admitted that the storm was not as strong as expected and explained that new ES-Alert messages would be sent to notify the public of the return to normality. She justified the measures by stating that prediction models "always involve uncertainty" but must be translated into "real" decisions on the territory, and explained that in this case, faced with the initial models, they decided to take precautions. The deputy director defended, however, that there was a "high probability" of rain this Wednesday.

Faced with criticism regarding over-forecasting, Segalà explained that the storms ended up moving faster than it seemed at first and that all prediction models have these margins of error "here and everywhere in the world".

For his part, the head of intervention for the Generalitat Fire Department, José Luis López, explained that the fire brigade was also "prepared for the worst-case scenario," although there were no major incidents afterward. Between 6 a.m. and 12 noon, the 112 emergency number received about 200 calls related to the rains, 50 of which resulted in interventions by the firefighters, none of them serious.

In fact, the only significant incident that has been recorded and that has caused serious delays has been the cutting of the high-speed railway corridor between Barcelona and Madrid due to a lightning strike, which has caused delays and forced the service to be completely cut off for several hours. There have also been about thirty cancellations at El Prat airport.

Little precision to know where the downpours will fall

The forecast initially pointed to a particularly complicated episode of storms and downpours on the central coast and pre-coastal areas, but the precipitation has ended up evolving in a more irregular way. In situations like this, typical of the Mediterranean at the end of summer—with a lot of atmospheric instability after an episode of very intense heat—models can anticipate the potential for rain well, but they have more difficulty determining with precision where the most intense downpours will concentrate. Storms are localized and irregular phenomena that can shift or reorganize in a few hours, so an area that started with a high alert may end up receiving less precipitation than expected, as has happened in this case.

Throughout the day, the focus of the most intense storm activity has shifted rapidly towards other sectors in the north of the country. This explains why regions like Ripollès, Berguedà, or Garrotxa—which had not received alerts—have ended up suffering more significant downpours and extreme weather phenomena than might have initially seemed, while in part of the central coast and pre-coastal areas the intense rain was ultimately more local and concentrated early in the morning. As an example, in the area with a red alert, amounts of water were recorded in a short time of 21 l/m² in Cunit (Baix Penedès) or 17 in Terrassa (Vallès Occidental) and Vilafranca del Penedès (Alt Penedès), well below the 62 l/m² accumulated so far in la Quar (Berguedà), the 53 in Sant Joan de les Abadesses (Ripollès), or the 35 in Olot (Garrotxa), as reported by Xavi Segura.Weather warnings, therefore, do not indicate that it will rain with the same intensity throughout a region or area, but rather point out the areas where, according to meteorological models, there is a higher risk of very intense precipitation or other adverse phenomena occurring. Meteorology is not an exact science, and in situations of irregular torrential downpours at the end of summer, it is more difficult to precisely determine where the most significant ones will end up falling.

Precautionary recommendations remain in place

Although the storm is already subsiding and the restrictions are being lifted, Solé has remarked that the Government continues to maintain an alert level of 4 out of 6 and has asked the public to be "cautious and prudent, especially when traveling". "We continue to recommend self-protection measures," he insisted.