Blogs: In the Field

Ethiopia announced last week that, faced with a 120 MW deficit, electricity will be cut, 14 hours daily for six days each month. Those lost 84 hours a month will cost the country’s economy 1% of its GDP.

Although Ethiopia has only 767 MW of grid-based electricity, it was more than the country’s demand until last year. Domestic peak demand has reportedly risen 24% since, beyond the national utility’s meager supply.

But Ethiopia’s power company, EEPCo, had every intention that two new hydro plants, Tekeze (300 MW) and Gilgel Gibe II (480 MW), would be supplying power long before now, doubling grid supply and even jumpstarting power exports in 2008. Once operational, both will loom largely over Ethiopia’s current largest power plant, the 184 MW Gilgel Gibe Dam. But technical delays and cost overruns, two characteristics notoriously common in large dams, are now haunting EEPCo.

Read Part 1 of the blog. 

Victor Caal from Las Margaritas Copon (Aviva Imhof)

Our next stop was Las Margaritas Copón: a village of some 45 families that's an hour's walk away from the river. To get there we took a boat upstream along the Chixoy River: a gorgeous turquoise tropical river surrounded by forests and plots of maize. Parts of Las Margaritas would be flooded by the reservoir, and much of their land would be lost: land where they currently grow cardamom, corn and beans. Here we participated in an assembly of ACODET, the community organization that has been formed to fight the dam (ACODET stands for Association of Communities for Development, Defense of the land and natural resources).

Location of Xalala Dam (INDE)

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege of visiting communities that would be affected by the proposed Xalalá Dam in Guatemala. It was an inspiring and harrowing experience. Inspiring to witness the organization and strength of communities threatened by the dam: indigenous people proud of their heritage and determined to fight to retain it. Harrowing to hear stories of the legacy of the war and genocide that killed so many people in the area and forever changed the lives of the survivors. To these people, who have been through war, displacement, violence and dispossession, and who have benefited so little from government services since the Peace Accords were signed in 1996, the dam is a new kind of war.

Exploiting the Inga Rapids could make a lot of money and electricity, but there's a snowball's chance that the people of Democratic Republic of Congo will see much of either....

Matadi Port

From Matadi, the country's main port and capital of Bas Congo Province, we headed towards one of the Congo's great riches: the Inga Rapids. The paved road continued, curving lightly past steep hillsides of brilliant green dropping downward into deep valleys. It was a sight I might expect to see amongst the foothills of the Alps. Below me to the right, the Congo River lay calm and wide. The serenity of the landscape gave no hint of the exploitation, conflict and injustice that have shrouded the country for more than a hundred years.

(This is part 3 in a 3 part series. Read part I: Take Me to the River)

Dust in the Wind: Ahai Dam Barrels Ahead

Raft Approaching the Ahai Dam Site

If the 160-meter-high Ahai Dam is completed, its designers will be able to proudly say that their concrete work erased a thousand years of lovingly crafted Great Bend terraces in just a few years of reservoir filling. The legacy they are focusing on is surely a more positive one: increased distribution of eletricity to a power-hungry China, and increased efficiency for the Three Gorges Dam. According to the engineers, the main purpose of this eight-dam cascade will be regulating flows and sediment for the world's largest hydroelectric power station downstream. Whether or not all eight dams are actually required to make this work, and what that says about the design of Three Gorges itself, are all unknowns in China's disordered grand plan.

(This is part 2 in a 3 part series. Read part I: Take Me to the River)

Meeting the Golden Sands

Just Another Day on the Jinsha

I awoke at 7am to the sound of tent poles being dismantled - a luxury after the previous day's pre-dawn start. If we were going to do the full 120 miles we needed to be ready to go by 10am. On a weekend backpacking trip that would be a piece of cake - but for 28 people to pack tents, cook and eat breakfast, and load the aforementioned two tons of gear back onto the boats in two groggy hours, it would be quite a challenge.

Click image to enlarge

In my short tenure at International Rivers, I've come to expect dams in every corner of every country around the globe. Still, I was shocked by the ubiquitous nature of these concrete beasts as we flew above China. On the three-hour flight south from Beijing to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, I counted over 70 dams.

The Birthplace of the Pascua (Gary Hughes)

Before it reaches a fjord that links it with the Pacific Ocean, the Pascua River, in Chilean Patagonia, races for forty miles between the two largest ice-fields on Earth outside Antarctica and Greenland, cutting its path between two jagged mountain ranges. Born in South America's deepest lake, the Pascua is one of the fastest rivers in the world, embedded in a maze of canyons draining snow-capped peaks and glaciers.

It’s also one of the most secluded. Today there is only one road that will take you anywhere near the Pascua. Known unofficially as ‘Pinochet’s Road’ for the former Chilean dictator who pushed for its construction, the road is officially named after the military work camp at its end: O'Higgins.

• Part I 

The next day we all crossed the Quiroz. Halfway through our crossing, a yellow helicopter slowly approached and passed us from one direction, then turned around and buzzed past us again from the other direction. We didn’t pay much attention. We were too busy actually having a little fun riding the cable car—even though we were getting thoroughly soaked from the waist down because the cable sags and the car drags the rushing water for most of the trip across.

magellanic coigue and guaiteca cipres (Gary Hughes)

After everyone changed into dry socks and pants, we began walking toward the most unusual terrain of our expedition, a type of marshy area called mallín. Fortunately, the weather had been dry, and the mallín was crossable—just barely. It looks solid until you step into it. That’s when you realize that it’s just a very thick and very soggy carpet of peat moss and other vegetation floating in water. At regular intervals there are islands of magellanic coigue (nothofagus betuloides) and guaiteca cipres (pilgerodendron uviferum). We made a beeline for these tree islands at first, thinking that those trees had to be growing on solid ground. Instead we found the most bizarre forest we had ever seen, with very old but diminutive--some of them even bonsai-like--trees growing on huge humps of peat moss surrounded by water. We were finally able to cross the mallín only by walking around these miniature, floating old-growth forests!