What the governor giveth

John asks how the approximately US$10 million assigned to Rosario by the provincial government for the emergency will be spent. Coincidentally, La Capital publishes an article today about that (and so does Rosario/12 as well).

It's calculated that 65% of the city's streets are in bad shape and need total or partial repaving — this wasn't caused by the storm exclusively, but the days and days of rain finished off many streets that were damaged by years of lack of maintenance. This work will take 15 to 20 million pesos.

The ravine of the Paraná River was eroded and collapsed in several spots, notably in the north end of the coast (the place called Costa Alta, where there's an open-air elevator) and in the parks located in the center-north coast (Parque Sunchales and Parque de las Colectividades). The ravine must be reinforced and walls must be built. That will take 2 to 3 million pesos.

There are many neighbourhoods were water is drained by open ditches. These can be more or less sanitary, but not in cases where the street and the sidewalk are not paved as they should. About 3 million pesos will be spent on fixing those ditches, so they don't clog or overflow.

The shanty towns (villas miseria) scattered in the periphery of the city get flooded very quick because they're built along irregularly traced unpaved streets and passages. Whenever it rains, those passages turn into muddy trenches. The city has been working for years building proper streets, with curbs, signs, lighting, etc., so as to "open up" the villas, as a quality of life issue and for security. The municipality will now intervene in 30 irregular settlements, using 4 million pesos.

Another 3 million pesos will be employed to repair the power grid and street lights and to handle waste. And finally, a yet-undetermined amount will be used to aid poor residents whose homes were damaged by the storm.

This is a good opportunity for the city to renew itself and for the government to implement and complete certain projects in a short time, instead of putting them off indefinitely as ideas for the coming generations. It's inconceivable, even in our country, that a prosperous city with a progressive government still leaves thousands of people without basic infrastructure and protection against weather phenomena that are (unfortunately) becoming more frequent in our region. And in a province that is swimming in cash!

I really have to credit governor Obeid — even if I've criticized his government countless times, the man knows how to deal with a crisis personally. The problem with him is the corrupt, inefficient, anti-meritocratic, nepotist structure imposed on his administration by a quarter of a century of Peronist rule, which he willingly defers to 99% of the times (the only exception I can remember was the repeal of the Ley de Lemas, which will almost certainly cause the defeat of the Peronist party next September). Outside of the restrictions of party politics, the man has collaborated with Rosario — as he did in his previous term (1995–1999) when Hermes Binner was the mayor, and until Binner started campaigning for the governor's office... This immense grant of funds will undoubtedly be beneficial to the Peronist campaign, but only tangentially, as Obeid has more or less tried to remain above it, and he's not running for reelection (he can't).

Will all the promises become reality?

Money, money, money

I'm not one to hide my mistakes. A few days ago, when the powers that be discussed over the money needed to repair the damage caused by the deluge in Rosario, I wrote "Hmm" (and I thought "We're doomed"). However, after initially giving AR$5 million to the municipality of Rosario, the provincial government set aside a total of AR$620 million for the whole affected territory, of which AR$30 million are for us. The province has an anticyclical fund, where surplus money is saved for bad economic times (i.e. to compensate for the cyclical crises characteristic of capitalist economies, especially Argentina's). Part of the money will be drawn from there; another part will come from restructuring the budget, and the rest will be borrowed from the national government.

So Rosario will get about the equivalent of 10 million dollars. That should be enough, according to mayor Miguel Lifschitz, to get the city back in shape in 60 to 90 days. Lifschitz said another thing too — that this is the beginning of a new relationship between the city and the province. Vice governor María Eugenia Bielsa, in a radio interview, replied that the mayor's words were not appropriate, as it should hardly be notable that the province is (as always) giving Rosario what Rosario is entitled to. I love the subtleties of politics. (What Lifschitz said was uncalled for and a provocation; what Bielsa said was a lie.)

What the waters are leaving behind

The rains are over for now, but the consequences are still visible. There are still a few hundred evacuees in Rosario, as the water has not drained from certain places. More than 60 towns and cities were affected by the floods, as well as three million hectares (30,000 km²) of crops. Important roads throughout the province are unusable, either because they're blocked by the water, or damaged, or because bridges have been damaged or destroyed. In the city of Santa Fe there were almost 20,000 people displaced from their homes, pickets demanding emergency aid are popping out, and there have been several episodes of looting, mainly supply trucks assaulted by groups of people as they headed for affected areas. Several pickets are also blocking important peripheric streets in Rosario.

The political maneuvering and eye gouging is starting as well. The province is asking the national government for a 20-million-peso aid package (and one has to wonder, where's the province's fiscal surplus they've been advertising ad nauseam?). A full estimate is not yet done, but in Rosario alone the cost of the emergency and the repairs that need to be done on the infrastructure climbs to more than AR$30 million (US$10 million). That's only to pay for the evacuees' food, mattresses, and all manners of logistics, plus the damage done by the storm to the streets. The figure is completely out of reach of the municipal budget, so the mayor is demanding that it be provided by the province and the nation, half and half, using special Treasury funds and a monetary stipend that the national government provides for metropolitan areas. As with all funds distributed through the provincial government, these are usually not distributed evenly: for political reasons, Rosario is discriminated in favour of the municipalities ruled by the Justicialist Party, and in particular, the capital city of Santa Fe. A few hours ago the Coordinator Minister of Santa Fe told mayor Lifschitz that they won't send all of the money towards Rosario because there are others in need as well, but the province "will be there with the rosarinos, as always". Hmm.

The mayor of Santa Fe, Martín Balbarrey, is facing serious opposition. Governor Obeid himself removed him from the command of the emergency operations, and 400 people who flooded in 2003 demonstrated demanding his resignation. Balbarrey is running for reelection; he's the same who was in charge during the 2003 flood, and it seems neither he or the provincial government have done anything to prevent another one during these four years. Santa Fe City is built in the worst possible place, on low-lying terrain in the junction of two large rivers, so it's vulnerable to both rain coming down from higher lands and to rises in the level of the rivers. When these hazards combine, as they did, the result is that the barriers that keep the water out on one side also keep it in on the other side. Santa Fe had to wait several days for pumps to reach the city and begin working at full capacity — while common sense indicates that those pumps should've been available and ready in a matter of hours, as soon as the water started coming.

Rosario is not vulnerable to river flooding, as it sits on top of a ravine — most of the city is at least 5 or 6 meters above the maximum historical level of the Paraná. The western periphery of the city is vulnerable to flooding because there are two streams and two canals there that may overflow. In the case of the Ibarlucea Canal, which caused most of the trouble this time, it should've been widened years ago, but there were bureaucratic delays, as with the Salvat Canal. One major problem is the relocation of the poor people that are occupying the lands. It's practically impossible for them to settle elsewhere; the cost of land and construction is exhorbitant and many of these people make barely enough money to eat. They'll be offered new homes, paid by the state, but they know very well that, once removed from their miserable huts in the worst possible part of town, they'll be at the mercy of the politicians that decide when to grant the funds. Many have already returned to their homes, even as the water hasn't gone away completely, because it's all they have and they know their possessions will be looted by their own neighbours if nobody's watching.

The anti-flooding works already in place worked remarkably well, mainly because they were planned with extremes, rather than averages, in mind. And this rain (almost 500 m in a week, half the average precipitation expected for a whole year) was truly extreme. Or so we think. We'd like to blame this bizarre weather on bad luck, and hope that this is (like the experts say) a one-in-a-hundred-years occurrence, but climate change is a reality and it's very likely that these things will be more and more common in the future.

End of the wait?

I don't usually write on Saturdays, but this will be brief anyway. Yesterday after I came home, I learned that the Ludueña Stream was on the brink of overflowing. It was drizzling all afternoon. At about 5:30 PM my mother, my aunt and I went to check the stream by ourselves. We walked about 10–12 blocks from home and saw this:


As you surely noticed, there were other watching as well (in fact, a crowd). The stream comes from the west of the city in a canal, and at this point it is piped underground. The pipes were built in the 1990s. I don't remember the exact date, but I do remember myself as a teen watching a huge hole with several excavators working down there to make room for the pipes.

After this we walked another 10 or so blocks east, towards the river. A few hundred meters before the mouth of the stream, the pipes end and the stream enters a new canalized section. This was the view there:



(The massive building in the second picture is the Portal shopping mall, which opened in 2004. I don't think they imagined the stream could rise so much.) Again, there were a lot of people exchanging rumours, speculating and doing folk math about the level of the stream. The experts (the real ones) were warning that a rise wave was coming from the west and would reach our area around 8 PM. I heard the White Helmets had been sent to Rosario and were assisting the people; they were giving out thousands of sandbags, candles and other supplies.

We went back home in a taxi. The driver was a Malvinas veteran; he said he was going to end his shift and head for an evacuation center, where he and the other vets have been working for the refugees. My mother went to a meeting in the community center, to get some updated info and advice. The head of the municipal Hydraulics Department was there. She came back with passably good news: the stream was fairly stable as of the latest measurement, and as long as there was no more rain and it remained like that during the night, everything would go well. Moreover, the Hydraulics guy told the neighbours that the river would have to rise to a ridiculous level to stop the outflow of the stream, and that we shouldn't judge the behaviour of the stream by the water level near its mouth, since that was highly variable, and the last section was in fact like 5 meters below our neighbourhood's elevation.

Anyway, we got candles and food, and I let a couple of friends know about our plight just in case. We sat down to eat dinner. At 9 PM my father went to the community center to learn the updated measurement of the stream. It was stable. The sky was clearing a bit and there was a chilly wind; we saw the moon for the first time in a week. We went to sleep.

It's all gray, chilly, very humid and slighly drizzly today. The stream is lower than yesterday and heavy rain seems very unlikely. There are about 4,000 evacuees in Rosario in 7 emergency sites, but they'll be able to go back home soon, or so they say. The situation in Santa Fe City has worsened; they have 20,000 evacuees, they don't have enough large facilities for them, and the rain continues up there.

The wait has been terrible, but it seems to have ended for us. The public works that so many people fought for have done their job. In 1986 there were 160 mm of rain in a few days, and my part of the neighbourhood was flooded by 70 cm of water. Since last Monday it rained 487 mm. That's two or three times the average for the entire month of March, something that will not repeat itself (we hope) in decades. And we didn't get flooded.

I've been reporting the situation to NowPublic.com (where I can upload large pictures and videos freely, unlike Flickr!). Other people have been uploading videos on YouTube. Check those out.

The deluge continues but so does life

This should've been out yesterday, but the news about the flood were more important, so I'm posting it now and updating it.

Wednesday was a long day. I woke up early as I normally do, had a shower, got dressed, and had breakfast, all of it oblivious to the rain — I thought it would be raining lightly and I could run for the bus with minor wetting. Then my father came and asked, "Did you take a look outside already? I think you can't get out." There was enough water in the street to row a small boat. I waited to see if the rain stopped but it got worse, so I phoned work to let them know. They said no problem. I checked to see if I had Internet access and wrote for this blog... In the process I read all the papers, while I listened to Radio 2 online (there's no local news on TV before 7 PM, and then it's not great-quality news, and you can't watch it online). Then the long wait started.


By mid-morning the water had started to subside, but there was still too much of it. I sat down and watched Roman Polański's The Pianist on DVD, interrupted by lunch (it's a long movie). I liked it, but it really wasn't good for my mood. I took a nap... then read some more news... answered my emails... and somehow managed to waste my time until 5 PM.

Now, what I hadn't had the chance to tell you... I got the electromyography on my leg as scheduled on Tuesday afternoon. It wasn't a pleasing experience. The doctor, a woman in her early 40s, saw me in an excessively large room, accompanied by the operator of the machine that measures your nerve impulses, and told me to take off my pants (and socks). Now I'm not prudish at all, but being in a spacious room with no screens and undressing in the middle of it before these women felt a bit awkward. So I lie down in my boxers, and this woman begins sticking needles into my leg. At first everything was OK... Stick a needle, contract or extend a muscle to see the response (I heard my nerve impulses as static in the machine). Then I got a needle into my calf and it started to get painful when I pushed as instructed. Apparently there was no good response to the electrode, so she thrusted the needle inward. I didn't exactly cry, but close. After a couple of minutes, the technologist murmured "He's in pain!" and the sadistic doctor relented. She measured nervous speed by making me wiggle my toes, and then sent me off.

She told me she'd report the results to my traumatologist over the phone, so the next day I went to the community center to see him. He came 35 minutes late and then got me waiting for another 50 minutes while he took care of other patients (he's in charge of physical therapy as well). Just when I was about to pound him with a loose tile, he called me in.

The EMG was normal (and it only cost me 50 pesos and 10 minutes of torture to know, woohoo!). The reduced space between my vertebrae is not compressing my nerves. The sensation in my leg is due entirely to muscular problems. The solution is more exercise — more time, and more varied. I've been sitting before a computer 6 hours a day for years, so it's not surprising that suddenly beginning a serious exercise program brought such pains. So the answer lies in ignoring the pain, getting my body accustomed, stretching with care, and taking a seriously hot shower immediately after it. In an extreme case, the doctor told me, I could try therapy (heat, ultrasound), but it's not necessary, nor are analgesics or muscle relaxants. "Go with the natural thing", he said, more-or-less.

So if-and-when the rain stops, I'm going out jogging again. It may hurt a bit but now I know I'm not slowly breaking anything.

(That ends the post I was supposed to release yesterday.) Well, it's now Friday, and the above might take a while. The rain has not stopped; it's actually getting worse. The two major streams in Rosario (the Ludueña in the north and the Saladillo in the south) decreased their flow yesterday, as the rain stopped for several hours, but they're rising again. It rained cats and dogs this morning and the Ludueña actually poured into the street near its mouth. The Paraná River reached its evacuation level of 5.30 m, and the ravine in the coast of Rosario collapsed in two places, taking precarious homes with it and killing two people.

My mother called me to the office to tell me about the stream, and that my street was flooded again. It felt like a punch on my stomach. I couldn't do anything else at work. I waited half an hour and thought of going to a friend's house and wait. Then I remembered that my brother was alone with my grandfather at home. What the heck, I thought; I can take my shoes off and get my feet wet. In the bus the people were exchanging news and gossip. Fortunately the water had gone away, mostly, when I arrived. A group of guys in yellow where checking the sewers.


The rain stopped again, but there will be more evacuees. When it rains, it indeed pours: the emergency center inside the Newell's Old Boys stadium got partly flooded. A new evacuation center (with room for 300) has been prepped at the Aeronautical Lyceum of Funes. Besides this, the situation in Rosario seems to have stabilized; the 3,200-something evacuees will have to wait, and multiple inconveniences will pop out everywhere (streets blocked, sewers overflowed, etc.), but it doesn't seem like it'll get terribly worse.

In Santa Fe City, however, the situation has quickly deteriorated in the last 24 hours. There are 16,000 people evacuated in Santa Fe and the neighbouring towns of Santo Tomé and Recreo; one third of the capital city is flooded, and public services (transportation, electric power) are failing. Moreover, the only hope for many parts of the city is the arrival of high-powered pumps to get the water out, since it has no natural draining paths. To make things worse, the city is practically isolated, as the flood has covered its access roads, particularly the Rosario–Santa Fe Highway; the only way out is through the Hernandarias Subfluvial Tunnel, across the river, to Paraná, the capital of Entre Ríos. The governor finally came back from Caracas (on a standby flight, without luggage) and is organizing a crisis committee. The national Health Minister Ginés González García came to assess the situation and brought medicines and vaccines for the evacuees.

I haven't heard anything about Paraná except it had a few dozen evacuees, but Entre Ríos is also getting its share; they had a record rainfall of 340 mm in 24 hours, and 3,000 people were evacuated so far. The Gualeguay River, the most important in the province, overflowed and is threatening the homonymous city. The huge storm system that is causing the floods here is slowly moving east.

The radio is serving as an emergency coordinator of sorts, calling the various authorities and experts to let the public know what to do (or not do). The reports come all the time and they're uniformly gloomy; it's by no means safe to say anything at all about the end of the storm, which may be tonight, tomorrow, or even next Monday.

The Deluge III

I'm wondering whether these days will be known as "The Great Rains" in the future...

It's the fourth day of rain here in Rosario. Yesterday afternoon the precipitation stopped for some hours and the clouds became less dense, but the sun didn't appear. Today it rained during the morning, then stopped, then drizzled, da capo.

Yesterday's alert in my barrio was just a scare, but it was justified by the menacing appearance of the rising water in the streets. When the rain stopped, many people went to do an eye check of the Ludueña Stream, where it emerges from four large underground pipes into its mouth, a few hundred meters before merging with the Paraná. Based on the pictures I saw in today's paper, the pipes were barely sufficient, but the water didn't go over the brim. The water in my street was the result of a sewage system that is relatively new but hasn't been maintained and was overwhelmed by the amount of water and trash; a few hours after the rain stopped, it had drained completely as expected.

(The above is an old scanned picture of the part of the Ludueña Stream I was talking about. The water was much lower, stagnated and polluted. Currently the water covers the pipe exits and reaches up to the inner brim.)

There's a delay dam in the upper course of the Ludueña, and derivation channels, built in the 1990s, after decades of fighting against the politicians' indifference. Populous areas of the city, including my neighbourhood, suffered episodic flooding every time exceptional rainfall caused the Ludueña Stream to overflow its banks. The last one, in 1986, was truly catastrophic, and everyone from my age up remembers it, so we were on edge. At 6 PM there was a meeting in the community center (I was there waiting for my doctor!) and it was explained that the Ludueña's works had proven our salvation. Back then we would've been up to our necks in water after only half of the precipitations we've had since Monday.

(You might want to get a map of Santa Fe now.)

Anyway, many others didn't have such luck. The rain soaked up the soil in the countryside and overflowed canals and streams all around the city and in several other parts of the province. Consider that our region is almost completely flat and it's traversed by so many shallow watercourses that until the 19th century it was known as Pago de los Arroyos, i.e. "Land of the Streams". The Carcarañá River, a tributary of the Paraná north of Rosario, also overflowed its banks yesterday. The Saladillo Stream, which forms part of the southern limit of Rosario, is close to overflowing too. The level of the Paraná River reached 5.29 m, only one centimeter below the official evacuation level — i.e. the level at which the river itself (not its tributaries, not the rain) may overflow and force the evacuation of low-lying areas.

As the rain subsided around Rosario, the situation worsened near the provincial capital, Santa Fe. There are now about 20,000 people evacuated in Santa Fe Province: 12,000 in Santa Fe City, 3,200 in Rosario (where they're being sent to a third evacuation center), and at least 600 in Carcarañá. Santa Fe City is finding it hard to drain all that water; it's maybe historically significant that in colonial times it had to be moved a few years after its foundation because the terrain was too floodable, and the choice of a new site was not very good. Santa Fe is much more vulnerable to river flooding than Rosario, and now the coastal defenses built to contain the river's rising water are keeping the rain water inside.

The picture is not brighter elsewhere. The city of Rafaela (pop. 84,000) is under 1 meter of water in parts. Many small towns have been completely flooded or stand literally isolated, their access roads covered by the waters. National Routes 7, 9, 33 and 34 were partly submerged and blocked in several segments, as was the Rosario–Santa Fe Highway and smaller Provincial Routes; NR 9 and 33 are working again now.

The vice governor of Santa Fe, María Eugenia Bielsa, declared a state of "hydrical emergency", while governor Jorge Obeid, who is on an official trip in Venezuela, is trying to get back as soon as possible (I was expecting that, only two days ago!). The Santa Fe Ministry of Interior got AFA to suspend the local football tournament schedule for this weekend, in part because the authorities and the police are too busy, and in part because there are roads, towns and stadiums under water. (By the way, and again showing the porteño view, La Nación has a space for this horrible catastrophe only to note that the River–Colón football match has been suspended. Clarín has a better coverage, focused on the also worrying problems of Entre Ríos, with videos and all.)

The executive branch of the Municipality of Rosario asked the City Council for a 2-million-peso (US$660,000) emergency aid package, which was approved this afternoon; this is to cover the cost of mattresses, bed sheets, food, medicine, and the logistics of handling thousands of evacuees. Right now, as I told you, there are three emergency centers ready: the Communications Battalion No. 121 and the gyms of the Newell's Old Boys stadium and the Náutico Avellaneda club. These are already full, so one more site is being readied at the Military Lyceum in nearby Funes.

The National Meteorological Service has renewed its weather alert (rain, localized storms, possibly hail) for the nth time, and says the bad weather might continue until Friday.

The Deluge II

Folks, this is starting to worry me.

It's 6:45 AM and I should be headed for work, but I can't get out of my house. There's water all over my sidewalk, it must be a foot deep in the street, and it's still raining. It has never really stopped. Last night the sky cleared up a bit but then the clouds gathered again and rain's been pouring down all night.



About 240 mm of rain have fallen over Rosario and its area since the start of the deluge. Just to give you an idea, the average annual precipitation here is less than 1,100 mm. I guess they'll have to update that. As of the latest news, there are 2,200 people evacuated. The first batch were taken to the place usually reserved for such emergencies, the Communications Battalion No. 121, a large military facility in the south of the city, but it filled up yesterday and there are now 910 people sleeping inside the Newell's Old Boys stadium. The evacuees are being taken there by buses belonging to the municipal transport company. They're given time to clean themselves up and provided with mattresses, bedsheets and clothing. Following their custom, veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas War have installed a kitchen and are cooking for the evacuees. Most of them are poor, often mothers with four, five or more children; in many cases, where the water level is not deep, the men have chosen to stay and guard their scarce possessions.

The Paraná River is not going to rise more, but rain continues to fall on the basin of the Ludueña Stream. The Ibarlucea Canal, a derivation that enters Rosario from the northwest, overflowed yesterday and flooded several neighbourhoods, some of them with water levels of 1.5 m. The public works needed to prevent this kind of flooding won't be in place until 2 years from now.

TN's Mr. Bazán was sent to Rosario (see video) to cover the situation. Even for a typical porteño this guy was completely oblivious to... well, everything. He seems to think Rosario and Santa Fe City are near each other, or suburbs of each other. He didn't research anything about the floods of the Ludueña Stream. He spoke of the 2003 flood and how our relationship to the river has changed — it was Santa Fe City and it was the Salado River in 2003, you idiot!

At least eight schools will be closed in the metropolitan area, because they're flooded or because the facilities were otherwise damaged by the rain. National Route 9, which goes west towards Córdoba, is unusable in at least one segment, and so is National Route 22.

The National Meteorological Service says the bad weather will continue until at least Friday, with rain, storms, and maybe hail. The last hasn't happened here this time, but in Esperanza, west of the provincial capital, orange-sized hail fell yesterday.

PS: As of 9 AM there are 2,500 evacuees; they're reading the facilities of the Hipódromo (horserace track) to receive them. In the radio they're mentioning two other possible sites (private sports clubs). In my neighbourhood we have an informal "yellow alert", since water is entering through the streets; many sewer pipes are badly maintained and blocked by garbage. Only 6 blocks from here, as reported, the water is already inside the homes. Only last year we were commemorating the 20th anniversary of the last flood. The situation has improved since then, as the Ludueña Stream has been mostly piped or channelized, but this is really too much rain.

The Paraná continues to rise: it was at 5.06 m yesterday and is now at 5.18 m, which is 18 cm above the alert level and just 12 cm below the evacuation level. People are being evacuated also in Granadero Baigorria, just north of Rosario, and the San Lorenzo Stream (near San Lorenzo) is overflowing.

The Deluge

Yesterday, home, about 3:15 PM. The rain started early in the morning but the deluge came in the early afternoon. All in all 101 mm of rain between 7 AM and 4 PM. I hadn't seen my street flooded like that in years. Others had it much worse. In Funes and Roldán there was hail.





People are being evacuated from several places in the city, especially in the northwest — not coincidentally the part of the city where I live. Some say it's 800 people, others update the figure to 1,150. It's been raining all night and all morning and it's still raining right now: 160 mm up to 9 AM, since yesterday at the same time. Thousands are without power.

The Paraná River rose to 5.06 meters; the alert level is at 5 m, so there's reason to fear, but anyway the problem is in the basin of the Ludueña Stream. I called home from my office today to check on the family, since I was hearing alarming reports in the radio. We all know nothing terrible will happen, not unless a truly catastrophic deluge comes, but when I was 10 (in 1986) the Ludueña overflowed and our downstairs floor got 70 cm of water in it.

And it seems it'll be raining until Friday...