April 8, 2009: Site Visit

I went to the gym and lifted after dinner. I was hoping to run, but I’m afraid I have become a treadmill snob…so I settled for lifting with the very good free weight selection. I was very responsible and went to bed at 10…but I didn’t fall asleep until 2. My body is still a little confused from the minor time zone change (3 hrs) and the early morning arrival a couple days ago. I got up for a while and read about Polycarp[1] to put me to sleep. ‘Sadly’ it was really engaging, and didn’t really do the trick. I should have gone with City of God.

We convened at 8:00 to visit the flooding sites. This turned out to be far cooler than I anticipated. We drove about half an hour to a dock, where a large flat boat waited to take us all upstream.

We spent about two hours covering the hydraulic study reach, stopping at data collection points in various states of repair. My favorite one was the first rain gage we stopped at. To get rainfall information, the local meteorology department simply puts a gage in someone’s front lawn and pays them about $13 a month to take daily measurements. The meteorology representative took the gage apart for us to show us how it worked. To our great delight, a certain kind of commercially available bottle works perfectly the dissection of the rain gage and not after hours festivities.

This is a small river by Guyana standards. Many larger rivers snake upland from the mountains splitting the coast, but the Mahaicony has an inordinate amount of rice production adjacent, so minor flood stages do substantial economic and residential destruction. In addition, flood waters introduce duck weed into the rice paddies which reproduces rapidly and displaces the rice. You can see how far the latest flood waters raised by the water damage left on this fence. Since the land is so flat, that sort of flood stage corresponds to millions of dollars of damage.

Apparently, even this close to the coast (at the most we were only 15 miles inland) there are very few roads. People get to work, transport rice and go to school using long row boats. The river is the main conduit of human transportation. More than once, we saw very small children paddling boats many times longer than they were tall. Also, many of the houses along the river were built on stilts. This strikes me as a far better solution than levees. Levees create the illusion of security, but when things go poorly, they go catastrophically. By allowing the river to periodically flood, no one forgets what it can do.

Here are some more pictures of the site visit:

From the dock

The water is supposed to leave the city through this outlet at high tide. But because it is blocked with Amazon mud, the water cannot get out quickly. It is a big problem. But I also just like the picture.

So, apparently the water is full of piranhas. And apparently, this isn't one of them. Let me get this straight...there are scarier fish in the water than this. Actually, the Guyanese found our mythical piranha lore to be quaint. They say that from time to time you meet someone missing part of a toe or finger, but they all swam in these waters as kids without incident. One of them did say that a common childhood tradition was to throw some sort of carcass into the water and see how long it would take the piranhas to strip it. Good times.

A father a daughter and some rice.

I really liked this tree.

This is me 'georeferencing.' When we passed a town on the map, I pointed to it and took a picture, associating a photo time with our location. Therefore, I could place the rest of the pictures by assuming a uniform velocity and interpolating. Yes, i know there are cameras that do this automatically. But, my way is still very clever and 100% nerdy.

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[1] For some reason, whenever I hear his name, I think of a dude composed of many, many bottom feeding fish…like the worst super hero ever. But he was a pretty cool guy and a central figure in the Apostolic age. In a time period with only like 15 documents, there is a letter to him, a letter by him and an account of his death (the first of a genre of early martyrdom accounts).