Issue #18: From Drought to Renewal
The Cycles of Water in Machuca Valley
April 6, 2024 - it hasn't rained this year yet. Everything feels dry, hot & brown. Earth cracked as if the soil itself is opening its mouth in need of at least one sip of water. But all the soil gets is leaves. Lots of leaves, so much leaves that one wonders how are there leaves still left on the trees.
April 23, 2024 - head of Asada Maderal, the agency responsible for water up in Maderal sends a quick "note":
Hola, x favor hacer uso racional del agua
Hello, please make rational use of water
The springs are running very low and risk of running out of water is rising. What happens if the springs run dry? Surely there is water everywhere right? There isn't.
One neighbor up in Libertad who sources water from a nearby creek shares a story - "we ran out of water yesterday, the creek is too low. I had to get 200m worth of hose and run it up to another spot. Hopefully it will rain soon."
April 26, 2024 - first big rain! 75mm(3 inches) worth of rain in fact. The creeks are flowing, the earth is breathing. Over the the next few days, everything turns green. The bugs come out and with them, the birds are chirping more actively.
May 8, 2024 - its water week at the Real World School. The kids are learning about water, why it falls from the skies and where it goes once its fallen. The class comes to visit our finca, we take them on a tour, my trusted caretaker Elvin shows them everything from how to source water, filter it, store it, distribute it back to the land once we're done with it. One of the fun parts is he shows how he finds underground water using a Dowsing technique. From Wikipedia:
A Y-shaped twig or rod, or two L-shaped ones called dowsing rods or divining rods are normally used, and the motion of these are said to reveal the location of the target material. The motion of such dowsing devices is generally attributed to random movement, or to the ideomotor phenomenon,[7][8][9] a psychological response where a subject makes motions unconsciously.
The scientific evidence shows that dowsing is no more effective than random chance.[10][11] It is therefore regarded as a pseudoscience.
Ha! And yet, I've witnessed this myself and drinking the very water that was located using this method. "Random Chance"? Unlikely, what else has Wikipedia got wrong?
May 9, 2024 - Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) announced this Thursday that electricity rationing throughout the country will begin next Monday, May 13, and information on the outage schedules will be available starting next Saturday, May 11.
ICE attributes the emergency to the lack of rain, caused by the El Nino phenomenon, which has lowered the water levels in the reservoirs of the main hydroelectric plants in the country (mainly the Arenal reservoir).
This is the first time since 2007, that the country faces power outages due to problems in the energy supply.
May 11, 2024 - 150 millimeters of water(6 inches) falls from the skies. 6 inches of water in one day! Biggest rain day of the year. This time I feel it in my bones - quite literally as me and my wife dig trenches around the house for the water thats building up to drain. We thought a lot about water management, but until this first 6-inch event, you don’t know if all those canoes and channels are enough. A lot to learn…
Perhaps those reservoirs will fill up a bit now?
Hopefully all that water sips into the ground and fills the water tables too. But it needs holes, holes through which to go into the ground. Unfortunately roofs, roads and cow's feet don't make those holes, tree roots do.
Today’s note is more a rumination than anything. There are real efforts underway in the area to improve the water situation and ways that you could help. We’ll cover those efforts with concrete ways in which you could help in future. For now, just raising awareness. Do you know where your water comes from? How much energy is needed to get it to you? Are you sure it will be there next year? 5 years from now? 50 years from now? Where does your water go once you’re done with it? All good questions to think through and perhaps talk to your kids about.
Here is me crossing a creek to go home yesterday. A creek that’s normally 1 inch deep…
Thank you for this!