Ship parade against the fires

Last Saturday, September 27, there was a "ship parade" to protest the fires on the islands of the Paraná river's delta, opposite Rosario. The municipality organized it, and called all the people without a boat to participate by staying beside the river and waving.

Since I've written about the island fires before, I won't explain it all over again in detail. In short: farmer needs place for cattle; government of Entre Ríos Province lets farmer buy island; farmer cheaply clears island scrub by setting fire to it; drought makes fire worse; smoke blows away, blocks traffic, irritates people's eyes and noses; ash rains on Rosario; wetland ecosystem is destroyed; Entre Ríos government does nothing; neighbouring Santa Fe government gets angry; Rosario sues.

The ship parade was the last move of Rosario's municipal government, one week after a gathering and a declaration against the unchecked burning on the islands and for the creation of a natural reserve.

You wouldn't believe the kind of bullshit we've been getting from the government of Entre Ríos and the municipality of Victoria, under whose jurisdiction the nearby islands are. This has worked against them, as more and more facts are uncovered. Entre Ríos, we learned, gets some good money from leasing fiscal land plots on the islands to cattle farmers. And the mayor of Victoria, Entre Ríos, approved the establishment of a meat processing plant there as well, even after the town council rejected it because of the highly suspect credentials of its owner.

It's clear these guys have some business going on on the islands. The governor of Entre Ríos was livid when he learned that Santa Fe's senators were requesting the creation of a protected area. Right now, Entre Ríos and Victoria can say they are unable to stop the fires, with what the drought and their lack of economic resources, and that anyway it's private land; but a protected area under federal jurisdiction would force the national government to preserve the ecosystem from such destruction.

The fact that Cristina Kirchner's government has done almost nothing to stop the fires, except when the smoke reached Buenos Aires, and that Environment Secretary Romina Picolotti might as well be a wooden lamppost for all the effort she's put into this issue, is also a cause for more anger here in Rosario. We've always taken this sort of local pride on being a "self-made city", so if Entre Ríos can't or won't solve it and Cristina doesn't feel like it, let them hand the islands over to us, and we'll surely do a better job keeping one of South America's largest wetlands and most fragile ecosystems from being burned to the ground for short-term profit.

If you read Spanish, keep up with the news and activism reading my blog Sin calma: No a la quema.

Boat tour

I went on a tour boat last Saturday! The venerable Barco Ciudad de Rosario I looks like new and it's very well kept. It does a couple of tours a day on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, departing from the former Fluvial Station (in front of the Flag Memorial). I remember going on the boat when I was a child once or twice, and then about six or seven years ago when an Argentine expat friend came from Germany to visit the old hometown. Back then I don't remember having so much fun. Saturday was different for at least three reasons: one, I had a beautiful companion (if not very talkative); two, the weather was nice as well; three, I had my camera with me, so I could indulge in my photographic vice.

The boat is medium-sized, with an open air terrace and a smaller open space on the prow, plus another open deck beneath that, and a closed space at the bottom. The guide is informative, highlighting different parts of the tour, and the music changes accordingly.

So me and Miss Enigmatic Orient paid ten pesos, climbed on the boat and waited for a while, until it was departure time (2:30 PM). It was hot under the sun, only mitigated a bit by this incredible fog we've been having at all times for like a week (not so much as in Buenos Aires, but noticeable). The boat finally left, headed for the islands, and then an old lady somewhere decided to get sick and the boat had to turn back and leave her and her worried folks on dry land. Off again we went, and once we reached the islands, the boat entered an arm of the river and then another. We saw many people in kayaks, canoes, sailboats, and motorboats; houses on wooden pillars, cows pleasantly grazing on the wild grass in tiny islets, and many, many tree tops coming out of the water, since the river hasn't gone down to the pre-flood levels. The islanders waved at us, and other boats passed by.

We exited the last arm of the river right in front of the Rosario-Victoria Bridge and went near it, passing under its shadow. I'd never been there myself. There were a few tourists, I guess, that had actually never seen any part of the bridge up close, so there were ohs and ahs all around. It's a great piece of architecture.

The boat then turned round and took us to the main course of the Paraná, along the northern coast of Rosario, and then the downtown. There are many things you can't see from land: old piers, rusty cranes, crumbling storehouses.

Well, all in all I took 120 pictures (including some nice skylines) and I spent the whole afternoon thinking in Japanese, so it was all amusing and educational at the same time. I'm still wondering what she got from it. After we disembarked we climbed along Córdoba St. and ended up in front of the Cathedral... right when the Archbishop was celebrating the open-air Corpus Christi mass. Really scary — lots of fervorous Catholics with banners and standards, chanting and clapping, and many of them young, too. Felt as if I could be burned at the stake at any moment.

So that was my day, and a very good one it was. If you come to Rosario, be sure to do this tour, or you'll be missing a lot.

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.

Here comes the water

With all the fuss about the recognition that climate change is man-made, the Argentine media manufactured their usual lightweight news to alert the people that, indeed, we've been so careless that pollution is suddenly causing Buenos Aires (and some other less important places, such as the rest of the country) to be hot as hell. Doña Rosa* feels reassured, since this is what she's been saying all along.

* "Doña Rosa" is Bernardo Neustadt's mildly elitist personification of (the lowest common denominator of) public opinion. If you weren't in Argentina and at least in your teens during the 1980s, just forget the reference.

The good news is that the IPCC's report has been so widely publicized that nobody can ignore it anymore (we hope). Of course the denial freaks up there in the United States (mainly), who insist that global warming is a pinko/hippie myth created by the New World Order minions of the UN, will keep to their belief, but sensible governments, and even George W. Bush, will now have to respond to extra pressure on the issue.

On the local front, climate has indeed been erratic and tending to the extreme, as you can see by reading some of my posts. If you allow me to sink to the level of anecdotic evidence (Telenoche passes that for evening news all the time, so why not me?), I'd never seen such weird weather before the 1990s. Back in school, we were told that Rosario was in the Humid Pampa, a fertile plain with temperate climate and four distinct seasons. That seems to be changing now. Winters are shorter, with a few scattered occurrences of week-long cold spells, and no rain at all. In the summer, you have several days of increasing temperatures up to a point where hell breaks loose and terrible storms bring winds, rain and hail in massive amounts; then the sky clears and the cycle repeats. Spring is prone to rain and hot as well, and autumn is brief, windy, unstable, but much less rainy that it used to (ten years ago in April and May, you couldn't go out without an overcoat and/or an umbrella). The whole region seems to be shifting toward a subtropical climate with two seasons: dry and rainy.

As of now, the north of Argentina is getting a lot of precipitation. People got flooded in Salta and Tucumán, and downstream along the course of the Salado River, in Santiago del Estero, a dam broke, apparently not because it was badly built (as it always happens) but because it simply wasn't designed to contain that much water.

It's also been raining a lot in the upper course of the Argentine portion of the Paraná River (around the Iguazú Falls), and all that water is coming down. In Corrientes, the capital of the province of the same name, 1,000 families in 17 barrios of the city have been affected, 100 people have had to be relocated, and the level of the river is expected to increase even more. The experts down here estimate that that flow will reach our area in about three weeks, and the level will rise by 40 cm, enough to cause some trouble in the islands off the coast of Rosario in the flood plain of the Paraná (see? that's why they call it a flood plain). The farmers are already moving their cattle to safer places, since the islands are rather low-lying. On this side, the river will flood half the sandy beach of La Florida, but nothing more. The good thing about Rosario is that the Paraná cannot flood it because it's built on higher terrain; rain flows naturally away from the center and off an abrupt natural ravine.

In the meantime, a heat wave has been hitting us for a week, and it was supposed to end today with a heavy rainstorm, but yesterday afternoon the sky turned overcast, cool gusts of wind blew for a couple of hours, and only a few drops fell here and there — we're cloudy today, and rather hot again, though it's bearable. My parents got married around this time of year, 31 years ago; I guess nobody would set that date today — you might get a scorching sunny day just as well as a tropical storm...