Adrián Blanco went twice to look at the level of the Los Patos ravine that Sunday when it rained a lot, enough to almost wipe out the town of Las Tejerías, in the central state of Aragua, in Venezuela. On the third inspection of the channel, a wave reached him and he continued after his wife and a neighbor with whom he had had coffee minutes before. Adrián managed to grab hold of some sticks and get out. He went back into the mud to try to find them. With wounds on his feet, he stayed overnight and did not hear from María and her neighbor until the next morning, when they found their bodies several meters from the place, in the center of town, in front of a bakery. “In one fell swoop, the wave swept away four houses and my wife,” Adrián says by phone, 10 days after he lost everything, while helping to remove the mud from the houses that were left standing.
María Guerra, 64, Adrián’s wife, is one of the 54 victims of the landslide in Las Tejerías, from which eight people were still missing until this week, according to the Government. To this balance is added that of another avalanche in El Castaño, 40 minutes from Tejerías, which left four dead and several losses in floods and landslides throughout the country after an intense rainy season exacerbated this year by the La Niña phenomenon and by more than 40 tropical waves that have formed in the Caribbean.
Adrián lived in the Bolívar neighborhood, part of the El Béisbol sector, located right in the gorge of the basin. He assures that in the 21 years that he has lived there he has never behaved in such a way. A week before, the creek had grown a lot, but he did what he always did, according to Adrián: break the pipes and fill the street with mud. For almost 40 years, Adrián lived with María in Las Tejerías, a town of about 50,000 inhabitants founded in the early 1900s. They first rented and then bought a piece of land, seven meters from the edge of the ravine, where they built their house. As in most informal neighborhoods, the family became a neighborhood. Elizabeth Corona, Adrián’s daughter-in-law, was higher up when she saw how the mud swallowed her house, next to her in-laws’. She called them several times that afternoon to tell them that “the creek had water”, that they should get out, that the wave was coming. She says that at 6:17 pm on Sunday, October 9, she saw when the wave of mud, rocks and trees reached Adrián. “When my father-in-law turns around, it’s because the wave comes and drags him, but he manages to grab onto one shore. Then I saw like a volcano of water that was mounted on the roof of the houses”.
Elizabeth doesn’t know how she managed to jump over a hill and save herself. Another neighbor of hers, Vicenta Galindez, had to open a hole in the roof before the water covered her and two of her relatives in a room. Yelitza Pérez recounts step by step everything she did to get her mother and her brother out of a ground floor that ended up flooded. She looked for a hacksaw to break a fence and asked for help until the water covered them and she made the decision to look for a ladder to jump to a roof and save herself. She tells it this week, still affected, from what was her house and to which she says that she will not return. “I don’t want to take the corotos (things), I just want the strength to endure that strong moment that I lived, to see the loss of my mother and my brother.” Like Elizabeth and her family, she wants to rebuild her life elsewhere.
past lessons
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Torrential avalanches have been a chronic and recurrent event in the northern mountain range of Venezuela, where 80% of the country’s population lives. The occupation of riverbeds and mountain gorges, as happened in the neighborhood where Adrián, María, Elizabeth, Vicenta and Yelitza lived, is a time bomb in many Venezuelan towns. Rugged mountains, abundance of sediments, rocks fractured by tectonic activity in this area make an environment conducive to generating torrential avalanches. An inadequate occupation of the territory, right in the throat of the torrent, and the lack of mitigation measures and early warning systems for rain, increase vulnerability in the risk equation, explains José Luis López, a researcher at the Institute of Fluid Mechanics of the Faculty of Engineering of the Central University of Venezuela.
“We live in high-threat areas,” says the landslide specialist, who visited the disaster area a few days ago. “The trigger for these events is a 10-day rain that saturates the soil, collapses the slopes and generates torrential avalanches.” López uses the simile of a tree to explain the functioning of basins and these phenomena. “The branches of the tree come together and come out through the trunk. Here it is the same: at the top of the basin, the tributary rivers come together, so that is where the flow that comes out of the gorge of the ravine, which has been occupied by homes, is concentrated. That was one of the reasons why this disaster occurred.”
In addition to the population occupying the channel and the flood plains, three poorly designed bridges, with central and narrow piers, López believes, caused the flows to be dammed and could have caused those violent waves described by those who survived the mudslide of 9 October 2022 in Las Tejerías. On the other hand, the Tuy river, where the Los Patos stream flows, was also swollen, so it could also have dammed the flow, adds the specialist.
One December, 23 years ago, in the midst of voting for the new Constitution promoted by Hugo Chávez, Venezuela experienced the greatest disaster in its history in Vargas, an extensive coastline located a few minutes from Caracas. It was an amplified version of what happened in Las Tejerías. Several days of rain triggered avalanches in the mountains and devastated the coast of the city where the country’s main airports and ports are located, leaving hundreds dead and missing. “In these 20 years, a number of laws have been approved, management plans for Vargas were made, institutions dedicated to risk were created, but there has been no political will to enforce the regulations,” says López. After Vargas, 63 solid retention dams were built on that mountain, which saved lives in subsequent rainy events, he points out. But it is necessary to clean them or build new ones in the place and where there are populations at risk, in the so-called alluvial fans where the landslides spread, to be able to say that the lesson has been learned.
With the Vargas landslide began the scientific investigation of these phenomena in the country, which have been documented both in historical and geological time. But López warns about some approaches to the problem such as those that attribute the causes solely to climate change. “This has been a rainy year and climate change is undoubtedly going to increase the frequency of extreme events, but in our country climate change is being used to evade responsibilities in the absence of measures to mitigate risks.”
critical rain
Nor have critical rain alert systems been created, like those that work in Japan and Brazil, with cities marked by the flows that come from the mountains. And this is a key point. When Adrián looked out to see if the creek was swollen, he was not going to find there the signs that he expected to run on time. “Early warning systems cannot be based on the level of the river, but on continuous monitoring of rainfall, with rain gauge stations that transmit in real time.” A relationship between the amount of rainfall that has fallen in the previous 20 days, which is what saturates the soil, and the short-term rainfall accumulated in 10 hours, allows establishing the critical thresholds that govern the alerts. “In 2006 the Ministry of the Environment had 630 stations in operation, but today I don’t think there are more than 80 in operation. Most have been vandalized or left without spare parts to maintain them, ”he denounces.
In addition to hydrometeorological monitoring, in countries with preparation for this type of event, movement sensors, inclinometers and wires have been installed that allow knowing when an earth movement has begun. “With a few minutes, people are capable of running 200 or 300 meters to cross the line between life and death,” adds engineer José María De Viana, who in the 1980s participated in the installation of a system of this type in the El Limón river basin, near El Castaño and Las Tejerías, where two years ago there was also destruction. “The frequency of landslides or mudflows is high in many parts of the world, and due to the economic damage they generate, but especially due to fatalities, it is a phenomenon that is permanently investigated by a scientific community that is in charge of exchanging information. In Venezuela we are not prepared and there are several basins where this will surely happen again.”
Nicolás Maduro, for his part, has provided a response from the ground, an unusual presence of the president in emergencies. “All this comes from climate change,” he said this week about what happened. Other members of his cabinet have dated back to colonization, in which slaves were supposedly forced to settle in risky areas. The Government has deployed more than 2,000 soldiers and machinery for cleaning tasks and has designated single military authorities for the two zones, to which the mayors and governors of the zone are subordinate. Maduro has promised a reconstruction in record time. But to Las Tejerías, many do not want to return.
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