The Comares Town Hall has declared the water from the network supplying the Los Ventorros neighbourhood unfit for drinking or cooking, after chlorates were detected. The restriction will last about three days and bottled water will be distributed.
The Comares Town Hall activated a restriction on Monday regarding the consumption of water from the network supplying the Los Ventorros neighbourhood, after a health inspection detected an issue due to the presence of chlorates in the Conca-Ventorros network. The measure expressly prohibits using the water for drinking and cooking, although it may be used for personal hygiene, cleaning, and other domestic tasks that do not involve ingestion.
The initial forecast from the Town Hall is to maintain the restrictions for about three days, although lifting them will depend on new analyses confirming the normalisation of the parameters. The Town Hall has not specified the detected chlorate level, the exact point in the network where the sample was taken, nor the causes that may have led to the anomaly.
To cover basic needs, the Town Hall has organised a free and ongoing distribution of bottled water. In the mornings, it will be distributed between 9:30 and 10:30 in front of the Los Ventorros bus stop. Those who cannot travel during that time frame will be able to collect water in the afternoons at supermarkets and establishments in the municipality. The distribution will continue as long as necessary.
“We ask for maximum cooperation from everyone to ensure public health,” the Town Hall stated in the notice sent to residents via social media. The restriction specifically affects the Los Ventorros network and has not, for the moment, extended to the entire municipality of Comares.
The demographic size of the area is small. The Institute of Statistics and Cartography of Andalusia estimates there are 32 registered inhabitants in the neighbourhood, 21 men and 11 women, compared to 1,339 inhabitants in the whole of Comares. This represents approximately 2.4% of the municipal population. However, the Town Hall has not detailed how many users or homes the Conca-Ventorros network supplies or whether it includes nearby scattered properties. Los Ventorros is located about four kilometres from the main nucleus of Comares.
This incident recalls others recorded in recent months in the interior of Axarquía. In March, Canillas de Aceituno had to temporarily ban drinking and cooking with tap water after high concentrations of chlorates were also detected. That incident affected around 1,400 residents and required a similar bottled water distribution operation. Similar cases had previously occurred in Iznate, El Borge, and Totalán.
Chlorates are part of the parameters controlled by the health regulations for drinking water. The Royal Decree 3/2023 establishes a general parametric value of 0.25 milligrams per litre, although it allows up to 0.7 mg/l when disinfection methods that can generate chlorate or chlorite are used, such as those based on hypochlorite or chlorine dioxide. In previous episodes, technical sources explained that chlorates can appear as a by-product of disinfection, without necessarily implying external contamination.
The Los Ventorros neighbourhood will remain pending the results of the new samples. Until then, the Town Hall maintains the recommendation not to consume the water and will continue distributing bottles to residents. The incident once again highlights the need for health control of small supply networks in the interior of Axarquía, following several similar episodes in less than a year.
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