We've now been 79 days without electricity. The rumored goal is for 95% of the island to have electricity restored by Christmas. Even if that ambitious goal is met, there is no doubt those of us down here at the pig's ass end of the line will be in 5% remaining. The only power company truck we've see was a van the first week when someone came through surveying the damage. Since then, none. Zip. Nada. Zilch.
Since we first moved here, I've wanted to walk up the quebrada, the canyon through the cliff where the river and the road come down from up top. I wanted to even more right after the hurricane, when the walls were stripped of vegetation. Today, on a bright clear windless and rainless afternoon, I finally walked up as far as "the curve."
In the two-and-a-half months since the hurricane some vegetation has returned to the quebrada. Most of the trees still look like Dr. Seuss characters, or something from a Tim Burton movie.
"The curve" is a big curve in the road coming down through the quebrada. The edge of the road on the outside of the curve was damaged before we moved here but Maria took out half the road.
I've known for a long time there was some kind of drain pipe under the road at that point, and that the drain pipe has been broken for years. That's what caused the original washout.
During Maria the unimaginable amount of water rushing through the quebrada caused more washout, more broken pipe, and less roadway. Now the road is a precarious one lane on a blind curve. At first drivers were very polite, very courteous, taking turns through the narrow space. Now people traveling both directions, up and down, speed through the curve like they have the absolute right-of-way. Or like it's not a narrow one lane.
Today I got to see "what's down there" from the bottom up. On the walk up the now-dry riverbed I was amazed and awed by what the torrent carried down and then left behind.
When I reached the riverbed below the curve, the jumble of broken concrete drain pipe and other debris I expected. This is what is below the washed out roadway.
That dark edge at the top right of the photo is the edge of the roadway.
What I didn't expect is there is a natural spillway there.
I don't know what Nature intended that spillway to drain, but there it is. I suspect when the roadway was built, the builders put in the pipe under the pavement to allow the drainage without going over the road. When the pipes first broke, water began to undercut the road.
The power of moving water is truly amazing. That's hardly an original observation but true none-the-less.
I want to walk the quebrada all the way up, as far as I can, just to see it. You know, because it's there.
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