Precious Tina and the Prostitute

The Liberians have recently completed their second set of “free and fair” elections since the end of their civil war, reelecting Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to her Constitutionally last term as head of state. The inauguration ceremonies are Sunday, just days away. It was a somewhat disputed election, so I’m glad to be flying this evening, just in case the losers get uppity. I doubt that will be the case, as the mood of the people seems high and preparations are in full swing.


Our CEO will be here for the festivities, as well as our VP of International. Joining them will be dignitaries and VIPs from around the world (and perhaps a few VVIPs), and they are starting to fill every hotel in town, including ours. Every morning and evening, there are new folks here, the more recent ones better dressed than those who came before. Nicer cars fill the parking lots, and the drain on the power grid must be measureable, as we just had a brief outage.

Our Mainer, Brian, knows all numbers of people in Liberia from his work in the Peace Corps in the 1960’s and through multiple subsequent visits and sabbaticals. He’s on the phone talking with locals, or having us drop him off somewhere, or getting picked up at the hotel, so it was no surprise a well dressed young woman appeared at our usual veranda dinner table. My first thought was that she was the daughter of a friend, come to pick him up, and he was taking the opportunity to introduce her to potential American contacts. That seemed true, as she said that she knew Brian because he worked in her village while in the Peace Corps. Although that was fifty years ago, and she couldn’t have been more than twenty five today, I attributed it to my lack of understanding of the patois.

Being polite expatriates, we invited her to join us and bought beers for everyone. [The local brewery, Club, makes a very nice lager, and was one of the very few factories that weren’t damaged during the war.] Shortly thereafter, a couple more of Brian’s local friends showed up, and we were introduced, but what I thought for a moment would be a large group for dinner turned smaller, as Brian left with his friends, and left Precious Tina with us.

After we completed the construction of the dam in the 1960s, the Company hadn’t returned to
the project site until a year or two after the breech, in 1993. A few of our current team were there at the time and related a story about how one of the crew, an avowed teetotaler, fell off the wagon one night and, while trying to ditch a persistent local prostitute, fell down a set of unlit stairs and broke his ankle. Due to the political situation at the time, he had to be evacuated overland to the Ivory Coast and more intensive medical care.

The main floor of the power house is full of large and small holes, just right for eating ankles. Then there are the turbine pits in which you could fall thirty feet before getting sliced into very ugly parts by what wasn’t stolen of the turbine blades. There’re no rails at all along the perimeter of the powerhouse to keep you from dropping twenty feet on to jagged rocks and water. Examining the embankments and channels forces you to scramble up and down sharp, uneven, and sometimes unstable gneiss. The trails through the bush are full of snakes, there’s malaria and yellow fever, and the Liberians drive as bad as Jamaicans. Historically, however, the biggest threat to a consultant’s safety is escaping from hookers.

That’s why, when our small group had drifted off except for three of us and Tina, and she was joined by a more obvious working girl, we remaining three quick bade them good evening and, carefully minding the stairs, hightailed it to the safety of our rooms.

Why Brian introduced us to local prostitutes is still a mystery.
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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.
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Existing Conditions

Although the air quality in the city leaves something to be desired, conditions improve mightily in the bush. Daily temperatures have been topping out below 90 on most days, and the humidity is tolerable, provided you never get more than a few feet from a bottle of water. The real challenge is the vertical. Although we’re only 50 feet above sea level on the floor of the power house, we need to go down two and three levels to get to the locations we’re trying to measure, and then back up again, a score or more times in a day. From the floor of the power house to the top of the intakes is about 70 feet, and then down another 100 feet to the water, scrambling down course embankments and even courser rock… then back again… and again.


The other day, I accompanied our two dirt and rock guys to the main spillway to assess conditions on that side of the current rivercourse. We made multiple trips down to the embankment toe and back up again, looking for scour holes and other signs of erosion. Throughout the excursion, we were accompanied by anywhere from three to six local men, who may have been contracted to assist us, but could just as easily had nothing better to do than watch the white guys poke at rocks.

As we moved about, we conferred and consulted, and eventually walked down to the forebay canal to ascertain what might have happened when the impoundment drained through it all at once. There was even more severe scrambling there, as the flows had removed all of the smooth surfaces from the old channel, scouring it down to clumps of the hardest rock. It’s beautiful, really, from a post-disaster mindset, but required a huge amount of climbing, all with light packs full of tools and water, lots and lots of water.

Trying to find the forebay canal was a little confusing, as the only consultant in our little group was there only once nearly twenty years ago, and the bush tends to change the looks of trails and buildings in a short amount of time. Fortunately, Liberians are a very friendly and helpful people, and an elder from the tiny village where we were stymied immediately volunteered to show us the trail to the canal, the same trail used nearly twenty years ago. When we got to the bottom, I figured that he’d head back home, but was mistaken. He kept with us throughout our conferring and consulting, and then showed us the shortcut back to the main dam.

Ultimately, it was a shorter route, but first involved heading directly away from our destination, and further downstream along the rocky and broken shore of the canal. There, our tiny group, changed shape, as our earlier group of hangers on crossed the river at the shallows and went home, but we and our elder were joined by a few more returning to their village after doing their laundry on the rocks. One of these was a girl, still a teenager, with a three month old strapped to her back and a basket of clothes balanced on her head. She led us to the shore where we headed up an almost vertical trail to the top of the bank forty feet above, where a relatively flat trail led us back to the van.

Before, after, and simultaneous to this event, we’ve been working to measure the roundness and plumb of the turbine pits. This is one of our primary tasks, and one we’ve been working on since our arrival. You see (or perhaps you don’t, because you aren’t here), there is an apparent gap between the powerhouse structures of Unit Three and Unit Four, a gap that doesn’t appear at any of the other interfaces. If the gap was caused by the great flood event, and has somehow tilted the powerhouse and turbine pit, then retrofitting Unit Four will become exceedingly difficult. By taking the appropriate measurements, we can ascertain if the turbine pit is still a true vertical cylinder. We’re hoping so, but need to make sure.

To do so, we turned carpenter, turning a big pile of hand milled 2x8’s and 1x4’s into a working platform twenty feet below the powerhouse floor founded on what’s left of the wicket gate spindles and operators. Then we built a second platform ten feet below the first, balanced on the unsalvaged vanes at the bottom of the gates. A couple of feet below that is water. There’re large holes in the center of each platform so that we can run a 20 pound plumb bob to just above the water, suspended on thin piano wire from a simple bridge we use to span the upper rim of the turbine pit. To dampen the movement of the plumb bob, we’ve suspended it in a flimsy galvanized bucket full of motor oil, which is tied to a couple of points on the pit walls. It took a day and a half to build the first one, but we should get all four finished within the five days we have before our turbine guy bugs out.

Of course, we don’t do any of this by ourselves. Our typical powerhouse crew is close to a dozen, with two or three local carpenters mixed into the labor. Over 150 were used to clear the vegetation from the main dam embankment prior to inspection. There’re usually a few more accompanying the geo-scientists as they poke around the rocks nearby. And we have our drivers, of course, and Liberian Electricity Corporation security personnel. It’s quite the entourage.

The first day we were working on site, we were also visited by another hundred locals, who would move up to the hole in groups and watch and comment for a time. It’s obvious that we’re working in the powerhouse, but it’s not clear at all why we would be cutting and assembling all of this lumber in a dank concrete pit. I think it helps, though, for at least the labor to know what we’re trying to do, so in my best Pigeon English, I simplify.

Ultimately, when we’ve centered the plumb bob, it should run down the axis of a vertical cylinder (the turbine pit). Measurements from the wire to the walls at various elevations will let us know if the pit is still true and round. If not, adding a turbine to Unit Four will be more difficult.

But I’m okay with more difficult, as long as I can enjoy the view.
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Mount Coffee

In 1964, the Company performed construction management services on a dam we had designed upstream of Monrovia in Liberia at a site called Mount Coffee. We originally constructed a long main dam, a forebay dam, an interconnecting channel, tailrace, intakes, powerhouse and two hydroelectric turbines to harness part of the energy tumbling down the St. Paul River. Soon thereafter, a European outfit added two more turbines in an extended power house. With four turbines in operation, the facility produced a nominal 65 megawatts of power for the next thirty years, until…


Instability in Liberia took its toll on Liberian infrastructure. As the story goes, one day in October, 1991, the dam operators were prohibited from reporting to work by one of the various factions fighting for control of the country. They weren’t there at a critical time during the rainy season to open the large tainter gates on the main dam and let the swollen river pass through. Instead, the reservoir filled to overtopping, then overtopped the dam.

What happened next must have both frightened and thrilled anyone lucky enough to witness the breech of 400 meters of earthen dam, and the immediate draining of the 30 meters of water stored behind it. The flood changed the course of the river, but also changed the course of the country, because there was no replacement facility for the power that Mt. Coffee produced, and even now, the government capacity in Monrovia is a scant 15 megawatts, barely a fourth of what they had before the failure.

At that time, the only real damage was to the forebay dam, which could be repaired without too much delay. However, the situation of the civil war didn’t allow the safety or economic conditions that were needed to have been in place for reconstruction. Instead, insult was heaped upon injury, as a very organized group of looters worked their particular form of dark magic on the power plant.

They took everything except the concrete and the tainter gates on the main dam, and some embedded parts that would be too difficult to cut up and sell for scrap. They took wires and lights and siding. They took the control room hardware and cranes and turbines. They took the motors that used to open the tainter gates, and they took the towers and transmission lines that used to convey electricity to the coast. All that remains today is an empty concrete shell, and we are working to fit a new power plant inside it, one that will generate up to 100 megawatts of power, as turbine efficiency has improved over the past half century.

But first, we need to make sure that there was no significant damage to the pieces we want to reuse. During this field exercise, we are examining the damage caused by the escaping water along the floodpath, we are examining the dam embankments for subtle signs of failure, we are making sure that the turbine pits are still round and vertical, and we’re examining the submerged portions of the powerhouse to make sure that it wasn’t scoured by the flood.

It’s great fun.
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Robertsfield

I couldn’t see much of the ground during our approach to the Robertsfield airport outside of Monrovia. I suppose having the window blind closed made a difference, but even when it was opened, you can’t see much from the aisle. I did eventually open the blind and leaned into the empty seat beside me to catch the view, and saw mostly haze until about a thousand meters, when the dark, grey-blue ocean faded into sight, revealing a sliver of tan beach, backed by an increasingly verdant landscape beyond.

Closer to the airfield, I could start to spot open field and rough tracks cleared through the bush, leaving stark red soil in their wake. Not a village to be seen, though, nor even a road, as Robertsfield is pretty much far from everywhere, except the chaos which comes standard in the Third World.

Immigration was a jumbled mess, but paled to the baggage claim, where the luggage from a mostly full A-300 was dropped on a belt that would fit in my living room, making it about eight times too short. Almost immediately, the ground crew started dragging bags off of the belt and adding them to a dense pile in one corner of the densely populated room. I was lucky, and had pushed myself forward enough to see my two bags enter the room, then asked a couple of local passengers to make sure they both got around to my side of the space, so a couple of other local passengers could haul retrieve them. Twenty minutes after we hit the ground, the flight from Belgium would arrive. Perhaps their bags would stay on the plane until my flight was finished with the room, but I doubt it.

Bags in hand, I waited for the other six on this team; a Canadian geologist, Chinese turbine guy from Seattle, a Mechanical from Maine, and our Geotechnical, Civil (Hydro), and Project Manager (also a Civil (Hydro)) from Minnesota. We were met by our local element who had transportation, but also, and most importantly, had permission from the Ministry of Getting Things into Liberia to get us and our things into Liberia without having to deal with Customs, and we had a mess of stuff that would slow us down through Customs - weird tools, construction supplies, survey equipment, underwater stuff, to name a few. It was enough stuff to pack an extended Econoliner, leaving just enough room to shoehorn the humans into the remaining seats for the ninety minute drive into the capital.

Our first full day here might have been my best day at work in recent memory. Up with the sun to start, then a nice breakfast on the hotel veranda overlooking the mild Atlantic surf. We had a couple of hours before we introduced the team to the client, so we split into a few smaller teamettes and drove a couple of blocks to what serves as the local Home Depot, but was actually two blocks of small and mid-sized shops crammed into a street crowded with the types of people you’d find at a Home Depot in West Africa – builders, homeowners, contractors and consultants, and women selling road food out of hammered aluminum pans and from transparent containers balanced upon their heads. It was noisy and hectic, but still relatively cool, and the street had a feeling of industry and a sense of the day’s potential.

A few miles away, down increasingly crowded streets, through various market districts, honking continually, was the client, the Liberian Electricity Corporation, behind a chain link and concertina fence. The kickoff went well. The government expressed their commitment and desire for the project to be complete as soon as possible and the consultants expressed their commitment and desire that we take the time required to get it right the first time. The first twenty minutes were softly punctuated by the rovings of a colorfully dressed woman, who ultimately brought in two trays of coffee cups, one tray of instant coffees and adjuncts, a couple of jugs of hot water, a tray of cold sodas, a tray of glasses for the sodas, two boxes of tissues, and individual plates of snacks for the sixteen of us. It filled the conference room table. Why we don’t do this in the States is beyond me.

With assurances firmly stated, we started the hour and a half trek to the project site, a drive we’ll be performing twice a day until our field work is complete. The first third of the time is just a struggle to get through Monrovia, where traffic seems worse than Cairo, but slightly better than Baghdad during the occupation (the main difference being we probably weren’t going to get blowed up).

There are more motorcycles here per car than I’ve seen anywhere. Most of them are Chinese and Indian thumpers, probably no bigger than 125-150 cc’s. Most all of them are taxis, with fares oftentimes higher than the four wheeled versions, due to the fact that they can lane split and weave through the standstill. Rarely do I see one without a passenger. Some with two passengers, one with two passengers and a baby, one with a couple of stacked plastic hampers, one with a folder mattress on the passenger’s head. I wish we had an open car. Not only could I get better pictures, but I could better hear and smell the streets. Liberia is a poor, poor place, but there is rampant economic activity throughout the city. It’s exciting.

The second third is along a section of road running up the left bank of the St. Paul River. A section being reconstructed under contract with a Chinese firm. They seem to be making progress, but are obviously slowed by the need to maintain traffic and commerce along the road. This section goes by easily, especially when compared to the final third of the trek.

The last bit is along a road that, at best, makes our little lane at home seem like an immensely wide sheet of plate glass. It’s barely as wide as the Four Runners we’ve rented, and portions are so rocky and rutted that it’s a real work out to maintain hold of the Oh Jesus Strap. At one point, we cross a bridge with a deck barely two meters wide, although it seems much narrower as we cross it.

Over the final ridge and the project comes into view, a site of nothing but potential.
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