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

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...

Super summer storm!

Yesterday there was a terrible storm over a wide area between Rosario and Buenos Aires. Summer storms are commonly the product of several days of high temperature and humidity followed by the arrival of a cold front. The heat and the humidity had been so much that it rained cats and dogs for hours.

I've told you about climate change before. Ten, twenty years ago I remember these storms once every year, or even every two or three years. They were clearly unusual events. But extreme weather has become so frequent that we might as well revise what "extreme" means. Lately it seems that almost every storm is a catastrophe.

Yesterday's rain was accompanied by wind and lightning. The state of maintenance of our sewage pipes and our electrical grid is such that within the first hour of any significant storm, thousands are left without power and/or get their homes flooded. Soon after the storm released its fury, while I was in my office (it was 7:15 AM), lightning stroke nearby and blew off something in our phone line, so we're incommunicado now. Surprisingly, nothing else happened there or at home. However, when I came back I found that a group of people living in a shanty town beside an avenue about 10 blocks from home had blocked the street and organized a picket. The avenue was like a river of mud, and these people were (I guess) demanding attention from the authorities the only way they could, as they'd probably lost all their precarious furniture. The picket was still there today.

We haven't had more hail of the kind we got in November, but the weather has become a serious issue. People, especially people who own cars and use them every day, have developed an accute obsession with forecasts. Being caught in a storm might mean getting your car trapped in a flooded street, pounded by hailstones, or damaged by a falling tree limb. After a wave of criticism caused by its lack of quick warnings, the National Meteorological Service has upgraded its weather alert system, and every day paranoid rosarinos check the news and promptly inform their family and workmates (by word of mouth, phone or text message) as soon as they spot the words ALERTA METEOROLÓGICA.

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...

Night out with the boys

I don't usually do advertising for free, but I thought this would merit some. Last Saturday night I went with some friends to a bar that one of them had visited once long ago. Nenina is on a corner of the northern Costanera (the avenue that follows the Paraná River starting just north of the city center), close to the impressive arc of the Rosario-Victoria Bridge, maybe 300 m south of Circunvalación Avenue and the municipal limit. Not many people go there on purpose, since the "good" parts of Costanera are on the middle section, full of open-air bars, discos, and the beach. Once you get to Nenina, you either stop there or have to turn back, or at most make in a wide detour to go up to Circunvalación, on the bridge, and across the maze of islands and river arms, eastward, to Entre Ríos.

I tell you, this bar should be in tourist guidebooks. Rosario's been working on that field lately, initially much to the surprise of us locals, but I still have to see a guide with a list of those small places that make a city special — those curious spots that most people don't know about and that you get news of only by word of mouth.

Nenina can be a bar like any other, where you can order a pizza or a carlitos (a hot sandwich with cheese, ham, and ketchup, optionally plus tomato slices, hard-boiled egg, mayonnaise, etc., not a tostado as in Buenos Aires) and down it with a beer... but that would be an awful waste. The place specializes in cocktails, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic; its menu is about 70% drinks. It's not cheap, but it's not expensive either; and the service is so good that it makes the money seem unimportant. These guys prepare a drink like a chef prepares a favourite dish.

My friends and I sampled a few cocktails and were pleased about the quality and variety. It's not that simple to have a place in a small establishment (that already needs to cook and serve regular bar/restaurant food and drink) to store a sufficient amount of several icecream flavours, several types of fresh fruit (lemon, orange, pineapple, watermelon, strawberry...), a lot of alcoholic beverages, and slightly more exotic ingredients (Tabasco sauce for Bloody Maries, fresh leaves of hierba buena for mojitos). The drinks do take a while to come, since the place seems to be packed all the time. We arrived a bit late and couldn't get a table outside — the outside is another bar! — so we went inside, which was a bit hot. That (lack of a) choice proved the best, since one hour later it started raining... and raining... and then there was something like a hurricane. Indeed, with the icecream cocktails and the margaritas to the tune of Gloria Stefan, I felt like I was in the Caribbean during the hurricane season. Naturally, at this point the people drinking outside had to get in or leave, so the place became slightly more packed; but the wind cooled the inside of the place.

The storm went on and on... You could see the trees buckling and hear the curtains of rain hitting the roof and the windows. Mind you, we had no wheels to go back. None of us owns a car, and anyway nobody in Rosario goes out by car anymore if they plan to drink alcohol. We got to the place by bus and had to get out like that; a taxi from such a distant place to anyone's house would've been too expensive (not in an emergency, but this wasn't one, and we'd forked more than a few pesos already). We waited (Bloody Mary) and waited (more Bloody Mary) and as the storm subsided a bit we decided to brave the drizzle and go up six or seven blocks to Roundeau Boulevard, where we'd be able to catch plenty of buses. That was a mistake. Two blocks after that the drizzle turned into a deluge, as the huge low-pressure center above us sucked in more clouds. The storm reassembled and we had to seek shelter in a porch. Forty-five minutes later the rain stopped (mostly). Off we went to get our bus.

Long story short, I arrived home much later, wet and shivering. Good news is that my immune system seems to have toughened; after a string of colds in last autumn and winter, I didn't catch anything...

The perfect storm

If you're really into this blog, which I doubt, you may have noticed that your intrepid host has not posted anything in the last three days. In part that was due to Real Life™ concerns and, thankfully, fun things to do elsewhere, but the terrible heat was a major factor. The lack of air conditioning in my computer room (which won't be remedied during this summer, unless Santa brings me something I didn't ask for, or the reader helps with a donation) made it impossible to survive in there, and my PC wasn't happy either. Yesterday the temperature in Rosario reached 36 degrees Celsius and the heat index was 43 °C.

Our very own Ayami sensei, which gave me classes during half of 2005, leaves for Japan after two years of serving as a volunteer in Argentina, so she was having her 送別会 (soubetsukai, farewell party). I took a much-needed shower with room temperature (i.e. warm) water, put on as little clothing as decently possible, and headed off for the Japanese Association party room, which has no A/C but does stay cooler than the rest of the building. Food was eaten, drinks were drunk, speeches were given, and just when I was leaving, Valeria sensei, my first teacher, who was trying (fruitlessly) to take in some fresh air just outside the room, noted that a storm was gathering; a few rain drops had already fallen.

By the time I got to the bus stop, just across an intersection from the Bus Terminal, the wind was rather strong. Dirt and leaves were flying; you could feel tiny things hitting your legs and arms. I patiently waited for a bus or a taxi, a bit jealous of the hordes of teenagers who filled the area as they prepared to go to bars and discos (it was about 1:30 AM). A group of people was sitting with a couple of beers in an outdoor table in the bar at the corner of Cafferata & Santa Fe St. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew off the large parasol on their table. The thing took the plastic table, the bottles, the glasses and one chair with it, and ended up in front of a car, which had fortunately stopped at the traffic lights. At this point I started seriously fearing that I could be hit by things more dangerous than dirt and leaves, so I retreated to a safer spot.

To cut a long story short, after a stop in the way via another bus and several failed attempts at getting a taxi, I got home more than one hour later, as the dirt storm had turned into a deluge. Based on my limited knowledge of meteorology, this was the feared pampero, a wind storm that is produced when a mass of cold air from the south meets a front of hot humid air from the north. It blows SW–NE and can be "clean" (wind only), "dirty", or "wet" (or, as in last night's case, first dirty and then wet...). Quite naturally, there are broken tree branches, interrupted power and telephone lines, and obstructed sewer pipes here and there. The storm hit the whole area around the Plata-Paraná river basin, so Buenos Aires got some too.

The first victim of the hail

A bit more about the aftermath of the hail. It appears that the blockades set up in the streets to demand "disaster relief" are now mostly gone, and the government's strategy of doing nothing (save keeping some policemen in the distance), which I criticized in a previous post of mine, was eventually correct. With the rain that's been falling since yesterday night and all through Sunday (it's 6:20 PM now), and since relief has been provided and the problems caused by the blocks have been addressed, they became pointless and unsustainable.


Some had suspected that there are political and pseudo-political movements out there trying to incite disorder; the mayor said it, and now the provincial police has obtained proof of at least one such attempts: several calls were made by two men last Friday to provincial and city government offices, to four schools, to radio stations and other places, warning that looting had started in parts of southern Rosario (rekindling the fears of 1989 and 2001). Fortunately, this disinformation campaign failed, mostly. If this had been 1989 (with hyperinflation and shortage of food in supermarkets) or 2001 (with peak unemployment, recession and a crippling shortage of cash), it might have worked. Mind you, the news about Argentina's spectacular economic recovery are all written from the advantageous POV of middle-class society and up; but the poor are not that many or that desperate today.

More disinformation was spread by the media (I'm not blaming them, as they're only as good as their worst sources) in the last few days. For example, there was the repeated denunciation that some recipients of relief were selling their new corrugated metal sheets -- which was true, but so far I've only read one proven account of this. There was also the radio announcement (multipled by word-of-mouth) that there had been hail in several small towns and cities around Rosario, the idea being that we were in for another catastrophe while the mess was still incompletely cleaned up; it was all false.

We had some, light hail yesterday afternoon (nothing like the other day), and then after dark there was a lot of rain that continued thorought the night. I had to brave it for four blocks as I went from a friend's house to the bus stop, hopping over puddles and over streets turned rivers, but it was nothing serious. We're going to have much rain this summer, I guess.

Hail hell in Rosario

Rosario woke up today licking its wounds after the worst hailstorm anyone can remember. After days of abnormally high temperatures, yesterday the weather turned overcast, then wind started to blow. Faraway thunder could be heard, and lightning flashed behind a veil of black clouds. My cat came up sniffing the air intently, her body tense and ready to escape, and then disappeared somewhere... At about 5:30 PM, before any rain had fallen, hail the size of billiard balls started pounding roofs and windows. That lasted 10 minutes. Rain joined in soon, winds up to 115 km/h propelling it (and the hail) almost horizontally at times. It stopped soon enough, and then, an hour or so later, it started again.

Right before the beginning of the storm, power went out in my house and around. We took out candles and matches, unplugged all the electrical appliances, and waited. The hail was a surprise, though. I initially heard some horrific pounding on nearby roofs, a sound of broken glass here and there, and then it come in full force; I had just enough time to lower all the metal blinders to protect the windows.

Someone got a battery-powered radio and we listened to the disaster report. One hundred people wounded, hospitals' ERs full, buildings' glass facades completely destroyed, pigeons falling dead from trees like leaves. Fixed telephone lines were down in many places, the cell phone network collapsed by message traffic. One fourth of the city's buses, tens of taxis, ambulances and power company vans, out of order because of broken glasses (and of course, queues in front of glass shops). Trees severely damaged or uprooted. Sewers blocked by branches and leaves, streets turned into streams of dirty water. Precarious roofs punctured by hail or simply blown off. Forty-thousand people without power. One person dead, hit by a car in a hurry to escape. And, as of the latest update, between 30 and 100% losses in wheat, corn and soybean crops in the region.

La Capital gave it a special cover and titled it Tarde de terror ("Afternoon of terror"). El Ciudadano, somewhat more imaginatively (if with a bit of misplaced humour) Ira de hielo ("Wrath of ice", a play on Era de Hielo, "Ice Age"). Rosario/12 named it Ciudad azotada ("Scourged city").


So today there are no classes in public and private schools, as many are without power, others are being used to held refugees, and some got all their glasses broken and/or were flooded. The mayor, the vice-governor and other authorities gathered a Crisis Committee. The mayor commented that his office's windows were broken and he'd never seen anything like this in 50 years (my father claims "this was nothing compared to the storm I saw when I was 20", but then, he says that about everything). Even Buenos Aires newspapers mentioned the storm, which is extremely unusual (given that anything beyond Greater Buenos Aires is considered less than their backyard by porteños).

The hail was up to 10 cm in diameter, and we can count ourselves fortunate that the storm laster only 10 minutes. I feel fortunate in particular because if my Japanese class had started two hours before, I would've been caught right in the middle of hell. My brother came home after it; it took him one hour (rather than the usual 40 minutes) in an over-full bus that had to take detours and drive very carefully.

I left home this morning for work (still without power) and I found the sidewalks covered with Platanus leaves. A couple of windows in my office had broken and some rain got into a monitor and a power plug, so we waited a bit before trying to turn anything on. One of my co-workers got her appartment's windows shattered; another one, who teaches in a university, says a roof there collapsed. Nobody got hurt, fortunately.

I wrote this in my office, I power has not returned at home (I just checked with my brother -- at least the phone works!). We often have these blackouts, but they usually last only a few hours. It's entirely possible that this may last a lot more. I'm now uploading at a cybercafé. (Sounds like a battlefield report, doesn't it?). I have some pictures taken at home yesterday, but they'll be locked up in my camera for a while.

PS: Power's back! Wow, 10 hours without electricity seems like eternity. I'm adding some pictures of mine and others.

PPS: And here's a video: