Wet Work

Few things are as powerful as water. That’s one of the reasons I like working with it. Storm sewers surcharge, culverts overtop, levees fail, and foundations scour. Heck, I can design the heck out of most any facility, but always run up against the need to economize, so the cost of a larger facility is balanced by the risk of failure (damn). For dam design, we’ll look at historic and maximum probable flood events, but no one ever designs for political instability. The original design of the dam and facilities was sound, it just couldn’t hold up to political pressures.

As a result of the circumstances of the failure, we’re also concerned that the raging draining of the impoundment scoured the material around the powerhouse, potentially undermining the foundations. So to answer this question, someone needs to look at the interface between the powerhouse foundations and the surrounding earth. A simple task, unless the interface is deep into crocodile infested and parasite filled waters. When this situation occurs, the Company looks for that special someone who will jump into shitholes all over the world, and I guess that’s a small list, since I was the only one in the water yesterday morning.

The locals assured me that the crocodiles migrate downstream during the dry season, but agreed to keep watch for them, regardless. Apparently, the fishermen amongst our labor pool regularly catch 150 pound groupers in these waters, which means there are even larger ones lurking about, but I imagine they go after much smaller fry than me. My biggest concern (besides drowning in some freak accident) was the unseen beasts, microscopic bugs that would burrow deep into my pores, resulting in an embarrassing, Alien-like, lunch spoiling scene, where the foot long, drooling parasite bursts out of my chest in an explosion of organs and viscera. Embarrassing, indeed.

So far, so good, though. As soon as I got out, I took a sponge bath in a strong bleach solution, which should have killed most of the little beasties. As a brief aside, I might have been the first naked white man seen on that rocky shore in human history. So far, I think I’ll live, as will the powerhouse foundations. To the best of my poking and prodding ability in two foot visibility waters, it looks like the foundation sits keyed into bedrock, just like it’s supposed to be.

Today, Marty and I rented a hand hewn, dugout formed from a single cotton tree trunk to examine the tailrace channel for signs of degradation and/or deposition. The boat came with a ancient Liberian captain and his mate, one of our laborers, and they would take us down to the mouth of the channel, a couple of kilometers downstream. Meanwhile, we had an angler’s depthfinder and a GPS to record the actual channel depths as we moved along.

The canoe itself was less than 20 feet long, and listed heavily to starboard. The seats were adjustable, meaning the three sticks that spanned the bottom could be moved fore and aft, depending on the cargo and passengers. The captain had the only paddle, the shaft from a two inch round stick, and the blade shaped from a small portion of a white plastic water barrel. The mate was in charge of launching, landing, and bailing, because the boat had a fairly substantial leak (what do you expect from a carved wooden boat?). The bail bucket was what’s called a tapping pail, the likes of which we had seen the day prior attached to rubber trees on a plantation that we pass on the drive in.

Except for the constant leaning to port to keep the thing level, it was a very nice way to spend a couple of hours in a rainforest. The highlight was the mouth of the channel, where it joined with the main channel of the St. Paul River. There, the waters widened markedly, to many hundreds of meters. The flow got shallow as well, but was completely still before it babbled across the layer of rock and continued down to the ocean. Around us was absolutely no sign of civilization, except four humans in a dugout canoe.