ORAL PRESENTATION

"The mugades" is a record that we have to remember, although we have not lived, we must remember that we have real facts. Muga is a part of the history of Castelló d'Empuries.

Another factor that made me decide to choose this project, honestly, is the proximity of the phenomenon, not for comfort, but the incidence of flooding that occurred there, what I call home, the town of Castelló de Empúries .

On the other hand have chosen to do this investigation because the department has proposed the research related to Muga and it caught my attention.

Finally, some factors that have helped me to finish choosing the research called the flooding of the river Muga are not is an issue which has a high knowledge level, because many people nowadays do not have experienced the floods, and therefore are concerned. On the contrary during the past that people had enough knowledge to know the damage that could lead both to get in such fields as infrastructure.

All these reasons cause which induced me to believe that this work would be very interesting and promising.

OBJECTIVES:

The main objective of the research work is to try to determine the return period of the river Muga from the different floods caused by river, also called "mugades".

The second objective is to try to develop a risk map based on data obtained in the main objective to appear on the areas with high risk, medium and low.

A third objective is to try to discover the signal that the river has left the bed during the flood.

METEDOLOGIA:

The methodology followed for conducting the research was to search for information on the theoretical physical geography, also from the weather ... and theoretical information on the bank of the river Muga.

This information was searched from castelló Hall of Empuries, in the Library and in the Internet.

The second step was to determine the region to study that was determined doing interviews to the people of the village. With this interviews I did develop a portfolio of interviews to find facts and dates of the various flooding.

The study area was divided into sections bring the following information:

- Area / length

- Form of the course

- Orientation

- Human intervention

CONCLUSIONS:

The conclusions that I have got with doing this work are:

- 12 floods in 80 years, from 1913 until 1993.

- The average time between flood and the next is 6.67 years.

- There are 7 floods on the autumn, 4 on winter and 1 on summer.

- From 7 floods that occurred in the autum 4 were produced in October, equal to 57.14%. Two floods that are in this vintage have been classified as major category, one in midle of December and the other in October.

- From the floods in winter, 3 happened in February.

Of all the floods that have been determined at this period of 80 years, 7 were happened before the 1967 was the year which came into operation in the swamp’s Boadella and 5 have been after this date.

- The most important floods and with the high category it is the flood of 1987, curiously, there was at the time of the operation of the swamp.

- This may seem contradictory since one of the functions of the swamp is to minimize the consequences of floods.
- But these particular flood was due largely to the lack of foresight as it was releasing water from the swamp too much and too late.

This is a clear example of the importance of good foresight to avoid disasters and risks.

Another conclusion which was reached and one of the most important is the risc map that you can observe.

• The red areas are the areas with higher risk of being flooded.
• The blue areas are the areas with a medium risk of suffering from flooding.
• The yellow areas are the areas with a lower risk of suffering from flooding.

PERSONAL CONCLUSIONS:

Personally, this research work has given a lot of knowledge about my people, Castelló de Empuries and a broad understanding and how act the floods and the affects of the river Muga to the population.