Governor Alfredo Cornejo inaugurated this Tuesday a work described as a "historic milestone in flood defense": the expansion of the Blanco Encalada Collector, an engineering project designed to prevent catastrophic flooding in high-density population areas such as Blanco Encalada, Las Compuertas, and Chacras de Coria.
The intervention, the most important in the field in the last 20 years, required an investment of 5,000 million pesos, fully financed with provincial funds. This is a strategic work to protect Blanco Encalada, Las Compuertas, and Chacras de Coria from increasingly frequent floods.
The entire cabinet, led by Governor Alfredo Cornejo and Vice Governor Hebe Casado, along with Ministers Natalio Mema (Infrastructure) and Jimena Latorre (Energy and Environment), and the local mayor, Esteban Allasino, traveled to the Sosa streambed in the foothills of Luján de Cuyo.
Alfredo Cornejo: "The impact is not visible, but it saves lives"
During the event, Cornejo not only recognized the professionalism of the staff of the Hydraulic Directorate and the construction company but also emphasized the importance of investing in infrastructure that, due to its distance from the urban core, is often "little visible".
"The impact of this work is not limited to the neighborhoods located immediately downstream, but it influences a large part of Greater Mendoza and other departments. Without this expansion, the flood risk would have been extremely high," stated the governor, comparing the magnitude of the new collector with historical canals such as Guaymallén or Frías.
The Governor stressed that this megastructure is designed for a 200-year recurrence, which protects it even against extreme climate change scenarios.
Land Use Planning: The Key to the Future
The central axis of Cornejo's speech focused on the need to organize urban growth to prevent "the general budget from ending up covering works that could have been carried out in early stages".
"We will deepen the requirements of the Territorial Planning Plan. The design was validated with high-precision hydrodynamic modeling (HEC-RAS), confirming its response capacity to extreme events."
Source: Mendoza Today
