In the southwest of the department of Tolima, in the Herrera township, more exactly in Rioblanco, there is a living album of postcards filled with exuberant beauty: the We’pe Wala Páramo del Meridiano Regional Park.
Among its breathtaking mountains, 12 lakes and hundreds of thousands millenarian frailejón plants, dozens of rivers are born, creating an invaluable biological corridor between the national natural parks at Las Hermosas and at Nevado del Huila. It is also a sacred place in the cosmogony of the Nasa indigenous community’s beliefs.
In part of this site, Grupo Energía Bogotá uses existing roads to build the Tesalia-Alférez Electric Energy Transmission Project, which will ensure the reliability of this public service in Huila, Tolima and Valle del Cauca.
Through these actions of good energy, Grupo Energía Bogotá and all contractors involved in this major project have joined the challenge and commitment of building in a manner that respect biodiversity, in the framework of sustainable human development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are the basis for our corporate Environmental Policy.
“And we are doing so fully aware of the environmental complexity of this entire area and under the guidelines of our Sustainability Policy and our main cultural attribute of Life Comes First. As in all our projects, we perform activities to protect the ecosystems, with full responsibility towards the environment,” said Alejandro Giraldo Castañeda, environmental manager of Transmission at Grupo Energía Bogotá
An example of these measures is the construction of 1.1 kilometers of environmental overpass boardwalks on some existing paths at the We’pe Wala Park (“Big House” in Nasa), which are wooden structures that prevent trampling and disturbing the path to access the sites where we are building the towers. One of them, No. 263, is at an altitude of approximately 4,150 meters above sea level.
Another action taken to prevent, mitigate and control the ecological impacts is the use of roads and paths that have historically been used by the Nasa people, who use the páramo as a corridor to reach the Cauca Valley. These paths were delimited with signage.
Giraldo Castañeda also points out that with the help of experts from different areas and assistance from members of the Nasa reservation at Las Mercedes, we carried out a study of the load capacity of the terrain to determine the maximum number of people who can use the existing paths without producing irreversible changes to the natural environment.
“At the same time, we have managed to rescue, transfer and relocate frailejón individuals that were along the paths and could be affected by people passing by, including community members and personnel during project performance,” said Giraldo Castañeda, who added that cable cars were also installed outside the natural park in the steepest areas, to move materials and tools to and from the site without affecting the environment.
These actions are complemented with activities to keep wildlife away from locations outside the natural park area, and with training for all employees who must walk along these paths or carry out works in the páramo area on the importance of these ecosystems, their care and the environmental services they provide.
