Flood devastation in Patagonian towns will take years to put right
HUGE swathes of Welsh Patagonia remain devastated by floods caused by the worst rainfall in 40 years.
Residents of the city of Comodoro Rivadavia have faced apocalyptic scenes, after 80% of the city was destroyed.
Homes have been swept away or wrecked by mud.
Upturned cars litter the city. Roads have been ripped up by the water, leaving gaping cracks in the ground.
A state of emergency has been declared in the Chubut province – and eight of its 16 counties are facing agricultural disaster as a consequence of the weather.
Of the 25,000 Welsh-speakers in Argentina, 5,000 are understood to live in the Chubut region.
New Zealander Jeremy Wood lives in the province. “It has devastated the town, people have been killed,” he said. “There are some very traumatic pictures on the net of streets and cars being washed away.
“The Welsh community is quite small and the government is going to have to help to rebuild the town.”
Mudslides have left huge areas isolated and without 21st-century communications.
Ricardo Irianni lives in the Chubut Valley. He said: “Where I live, the main problem was not a flood, it was that heavy rains carried a lot of silt and clay in heavy mud from the soils of the plateau into the Chubut river.
“As the companies that bring the drinkable water take it directly from this river, this meant that the water could not be purified for many days for the population of the cities.”
These include Dolavon, Trelew, Rawson, Porth Madryn and Gaiman – a cultural centre of the Welsh settlement region known as Y Wladfa.
The situation has now been fixed but people remain “very angry” with the authorities.
“The second and huge problem, catastrophic and devastating, was the heavy rain – more than 400mm in a couple of days – in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia, 370km south from here,” Ricardo said.
“That destroyed houses, roads and facilities.
“It will take months for the city to recover from that, and years for quite a number of families.”
Clare Vaughan is the Welsh language teaching co-ordinator in Y Wladfa.
She said: “The major damage was in the city of Comodoro Rivadavia to the south-east of the province, which received all its year’s rain in seven hours. There was no way the water could soak away.
“There were 4x4s washed away, a hill behind the town had a landslide and lots of precarious houses were destroyed.
“Then about a week later there was really unusually heavy rain over the Paith, or the central steppe, which divided the Andes from the Atlantic coast and what we call Dyffryn Camwy – the Chubut valley.”
At Dique Ameghino a dam was built to prevent floods, following those of 1899 and 1901.
“This was built in the 1960s and not only regulates the water coming down from the mountains but also provided electricity for the Valley,” Clare said.
“There was so much water entering the reservoir and the river that the machines that work to make the water fit for human consumption were unable to cope with the sediment and so were turned off.
Residents in Gaiman and Trelew have recently got water back after 15 days.
“Some less-than-scrupulous shops were charging double the price for bottled water, which disappeared as soon as it came into stock,” Clare said.
“Life is getting back to normal but everyone has been advised to thoroughly clean out their water tanks.”