I return to Lima to discover a climate crisis of the sort that hits the country every five or six years. This even has a name – El Niño, the boy child, because it tends to arrive at Christmas time.
Unusually heavy rain on the hills is producing flooding across much of the country. The most damaging threat is huaycos, sudden powerful flash floods or mudslides which rush down quebradas, ravines. The heavy rains falling on steep rocky hillsides without vegetation quickly run off, bringing with them sand and gravel. They gather momentum as they descend, picking up heavier materials and filling the rios secos, dry river beds, with a churning mud. When they hit the river valleys they are roaring snarling monsters which appear in seconds. They sweep away everything before them – cars and trucks, houses, cows, pigs and goats – tear up roads, dash against bridge supports.
In places, the hillsides are receiving 78 mm of rainfall in an hour, 78 litres per cubic metre in an hour, and 250 litres overnight. All that churning mud from the hillsides is ending up in rivers like the Rimac, from where Lima takes its drinking water.
Normally a slow meander through the centre of Lima, or in the winter months just a trickle, today it is a roaring brown torrent, and from the bridge behind the President’s Palace I can hear the grinding of boulders rolling downstream.
The mud and grit is clogging the filters of the water treatment plant upstream in Huachipa, from where an ancient canal takes water through the present day Huachipa Zoo, under the dense housing of Ate Vitarte.
Much of the canal was still open ten years ago, but choked with litter and dead dogs. It has been covered over now, but I traced the route by bicycle as it passed close by the indoor markets of Ate and then, above ground again, down the wide green linear park through Mayorazgo. It originally went past the Ychsma and Inca site of Purochuco, where the old clay-walled channel is still visible, and then flowed behind the football ground of “la U”, Universitaria, the Estadio Monumental – to irrigate pre-hispanic farmlands down to the coast.
Initially, in February, the water treatment plant at Huachipa would stop work and clean the filters once a week, and districts would have no running water for a few hours, a day, or overnight. As the frequency of the huaycos intensifies, the plant is out of action more often and for longer periods.
“Lima at the limit” screams the daily newspaper El Correo, “districts of the Capital suffer severe water shortage…”, beside photographs of people queueing with plastic buckets at a water distribution point. “Thousands in Lima circle the streets searching for water…dozens filling their buckets at the water fountain in front of the Governor’s Palace…”.
In a photograph below the headline “…120 houses in Chosica threatened by a new flood…” a rampaging river of mud is shown flowing down a street on the outskirts of Lima, tearing through flimsy houses backing onto the railway.
The city and its suburbs are surrounded by a rapid growth of settlements housing 30 million people, mostly immigrants of the past 40 years. The resulting sprawl has not yet, it seems, become a city. The state water company, Sedapal, is asking people who have wells to share their water. On a Sunday afternoon in Miraflores, the most upmarket district of Lima, after four days with limited water, people wander the streets with buckets, or robust new water containers they have just bought from the hardware store.
The President texted me yesterday morning. “Countrymen, we are working tirelessly to bring the necessary help to our brothers in trouble. We are united and calm.”
And then again in the afternoon.
“Peru needs us united and ready. Follow the recommendations and keep informed at www.unasolafuerza.com – only one force.”
“Peru unites itself” says El Popular, showing pictures of the aid collection points in front of the Presidential Palace. “Thousands bring help for the victims of the mudslides…the Palace of Government opens its doors to receive donations as children and adults come together in an show of solidarity.”
This city is in a desert. We have two rivers from the mountains, but little food grows here, and many of the roads to bring it in are damaged by the floods and huaicos. At the moment, lemons, tomatoes, onions and basic vegetables are selling at two or three times the normal price. The supermarkets are still stocked, though some of them ran out of bottled water last week.
On social media, foreigners living in Lima are screaming their pain. Angry residents from the USA take to Facebook to complain that the inflated price of lemons is an abuse of the free market. The reports of thousands homeless in floods are apparently “fake news”.
Water water everywhere. Whilst many towns are flooded, rivers are at record high levels, and farmland is submerged, here in Peru’s capital there is, for many, not a drop to drink.
The water goes off throughout Lima one Wednesday for a planned maintenance, to clean the filters of the water plant. It is scheduled to come back on Thursday, but we wait until Friday, then Saturday morning at 6, then Saturday afternoon at 3, then finally the water supply is restored at 7 pm, only to go off at 10.30 pm. In the confusion and uncertainty people are bulk buying bottled water as rumours of scarcity, of supermarkets and shops with empty shelves, spread through social networks and neighbourhood conversations.
I go to fill two water containers at a water distribution point a few blocks away. A Water Company worker is pumping water up from an underground cistern in the forecourt of a school. A dozen people, mostly children, cluster round the spouting hosepipe, to fill a collection of buckets, basins and bottles.
The schools in Lima are shut for two days, and then the closure is extended for a further three days, for a further week. Flights and buses to the north of the country are stopped on Friday. Flights from the north have trebled in price. The airline celebrates this as proof that the free market is working.
In Lima itself, a seven year old bridge hangs limply, one end touching the waters of the Rimac, where the bank has been washed away.
The bridge was commissioned by the Lima mayor from a contractor who had never built a bridge before. The inspector who was paid to check the building project admits he never visited the site. The engineer responsible for overseeing the project explains in an interview that the bridge “desplomado”, “it did not collapse, it sank”. The phrase gains instant fame.
The thousand year old system of irrigation canals for farming that takes water throughout Lima is still used to water the parks, the golf courses, the racetrack. This water also comes from the Rimac at Huachipa, where the water processing plant is unable to cope. Whilst Lima’s water delivery system is at a standstill, the indigenous system still functions.
In Surco, people see that there is a continuous flow of water to the parks, and fill their buckets. People are taking water out of ponds, out of ornamental fountains. Employees at the US embassy are observed with hosepipes spraying water over the lawns, to the horror of passers-by. That water too is being drawn from ancient canals that flow behind the building.
Writing in his column in El Correo a Catholic priest blames the floods, deaths and forces of nature on “ideologia de genero”, the religious right’s term for sex and sex equality education in schools. The government has introduced these principles to the national education curriculum, and people are marching in protest under the slogan “Con mis hijos no te metas,” “Don’t you mess with my kids”.
The founder of the far right catholic institution Sodalicio, which runs schools and universities throughout South America, sexually abused young boys in his care. The organisation has a lot of money. The successor he chose to lead the organisation was a boy he abused. That boy, growing to adulthood and becoming a high status member of the cult, in turn abused boys. The cult helped one member move to Canada when his abuse of boys at Colegio San Pedro became public knowledge. He settled there and married a nursery school teacher. Legal proceedings in Peru have been archived several times. The organisation has a lot of money. In recent years the Sodalicio has been working with contacts in the Canadian catholic education network, including the Canadian Minister of Education, and extending its activities into Columbia and Ecuador. The cult has a lot of money.
The first major floods started on the 20th January. The following day there was a huayco in Santa Rosa de Quives, and then in Ricardo Palma, in Huarochiri. The surface temperature of the sea increased by 4 degrees off the coast of Northern Peru. Within a week, the State Meteorological Service declared a level four red alert for the northern regions of Tumbes, Piura, La Libertad and Lambayeque. This was just the beginning.
El Niño is a weather event which periodically affects the Peru, but is actually a phenomenon across the Pacific, also impacting on New Zealand, Malaysia and other parts.
Although the usual definition of an El Niño event, three months of elevated sea temperatures, has not yet been reached, according to Dr Antonio Mabres, Doctor in Physical Sciences at the University of Zaragoza, “because of the heavy rains and and temperatures 5 to 6 degrees higher than normal, we would have to say this is a very strong “Coastal Niño””
“As long as the rains continue, they will keep flooding these ravines which have been inactive for many years, producing huaycos that are doing so much damage to the population and to infrastructure.”
From the 15th of January there has been a gradual increase in the sea temperature, with anomalies of one, two, even four degrees in the north. It has continued to increase until it reached levels of over 10 degrees in places. The tropical waters have stayed trapped on the coast because there have been no winds coming from the South Pacific.
Some 2000 kilometres of main roads have been washed away, another 4,500 kilometres are damaged. 175 bridges have collapsed, 650 kilometres of irrigation canals have been destroyed. 10,000 hectares of agricultural land have been lost and another 20,000 have considerable damage.
Normally the coast of Peru is washed by a cold stream, the Humboldt Current, which means that virtually no rain, falls on the yunga, the coastal plains, and very little inland up to 1000 metres. It is a desert by the sea. The cold current also brings nutrient rich waters which makes the fisheries of Peru amongst the richest in the world. Anchovies and sardines make up 90% of Peru’s fishing industry.
But the unusual warm sea water produces more water vapour which is blown by the onshore breezes over the land where it condenses and falls as rain. El Niño means unexpected rain on the coast, and poor rewards for the fishermen. It can also mean hailstorms which damage crops in the highlands, drought in some areas and floods in others, and it happens every five or eight years. The history of Peru is full of civilisations which appear and disappear, and for some archaeologists, devastating El Niños, or more plausibly, a series of severe years, could be the explanation. The Moche civilisation in particular, on the north coast, is thought to have been destroyed by El Niño events. For the Nazca, hundred year long dry periods have been proposed. The Chimu were probably overcome by a man-made disaster, when the Incas cut off the irrigation system which supplied the city of Chan Chan.
Some threats today are new. The 630 thousand tonnes of toxic waste tailings dumped by a mining company in a steep sided pile at Tamboraque, beside the Rio Rimac, 90 kilometres upstream from the city of Lima, for example. Defensa Civil have been asking for it to be relocated for years, since 2008, and the company keeps requesting more time. There are many similar tailings in the Rimac watershed.
The flooding has devastated large areas of the coast. The morning papers say it every day. “Total Chaos” screams Exitosa over a full page photo of army and police helping people across a flooded town street. “Thousands hit by disasters begging for help over lack of essentials and water to drink . . . sections of the Central Highway blocked by flash floods . . . food prices shoot up . . . Lima residents live under threat of constant water cuts”.
And this from a Peruvian teenager living in Miami: “we Peruvians pay a lot of money for a good water service and this is the best they can offer us? You are telling me that millions of soles are not enough to create a better system to filter the water? Are you kidding me?”
But in Lima the shut down of the water supply has been publicised in advance, and people have been able to fill up their buckets and baths from the taps. Clean bottled water is available in most shops and supermarkets, though there is some panic buying – wealthy residents of Miraflores can be seen with trolley loads of bottled water, pushed by their maid or housekeeper, queueing at the till.
The situation in the rest of the country is grimmer. By 24th March the Government estimates 140,000 houses flooded or swept away, 84 dead and 20 disappeared, 650,000 people affected. Humanitarian aid, foodstuffs and bottled water are being sent to the north by ship, as the roads are impassable, bridges are down.
The social media in Peru are flooded with home-made videos of maelstroms of mud and rock crashing suddenly down main streets, dragging trucks in their wake. In Punta Hermosa, a beach resort an hour south of Lima, a torrent of water, and timbers flows under two bridges. Onlookers struggle to haul a pig from the shallows up the muddy bank. A 12 metre lorry container comes downstream, passes under the first bridge, and then swings side on, resting against the supports of the lower bridge.
The logjam swirls round and piles up against the blockage, a dazed cow floats round in a gentle circles. Amongst the pallets and posts, a leg kicks, and a girl clambers upwards completely coated in mud, pushing her hair to one side.
Like a chat show guest walking on stage, she waves a weak hand to the observers. She gets up on all fours as the current pulls her back towards the river, and then drops below the surface and is covered by sticks and posts. Seconds pass. Again a hand comes up, she grips on a board and she raises herself, she stands, and walks across the surface of floating timbers before collapsing by the bank where she is pulled ashore.
I learn later that Evangelina Chamorro, 32, was trying to rescue her pigs when the huayco hit. She was dragged downstream for three kilometres, was in the water for eight minutes, and remembers nothing.
After all this, I expect there may be changes on my next visit to the stones of Chincheros.