The biggest hail storm ever recorded in Bogotá

Photo by edahurtado/Flickr

Photo by lilianazombie/Flickr

On Saturday, a lot of rain and hail fell all over Bogotá, Colombia’s capital city. According to IDEAM, Colombia’s meteorological institute, the blame goes to La Niña, which will cause even more rain until January 2008. Most of the city became white around 3 p.m. Downtown, the water level, which reached 1.5 metres, trapped 20 cars; 100 people had to be rescued.

The first day of Rock al Parque festival, which began yesterday, had to be cancelled due to the heavy rain. There were no casualties, but some people were treated of hypothermia, since almost no one was wearing warm clothes, despite the fact that the rainy season started a month ago. Others where wounded by the ice balls. On Sunday, rescue and firemen teams were still taking ice out from building basements.

Photo by asdrubalcolombia/Flickr

Despite its tropical location, there are hailstorms somewhat often in Bogotá. Nevertheless, yesterday’s was the hugest I’ve ever seen… on TV. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I was at home, northwest Bogotá, and though there was a heavy rain, we didn’t have more hail than usual here… which was one of the few parts of the city which didn’t turn white.

There are a lot of pictures of this event, from Italian newspaper La Repubblica to a lot of “Flickrs” and YouTubers. Some bloggers, like Gabriel Muelle, have referred to this event, maybe thinking this was the so-called “hecatomb” (translated as ‘catastrophe’ in some media outlets but with several puns possible in Spanish language) which would make president Álvaro Uribe seek a third term in office. Is this a “punishment from the Gods”?

False quake alarm in Bogotá [video]

Ignorance. That’s the word which would summarize what happened on Tuesday 28 August in Bogotá. After Peru’s earthquake, and as every time a quake happens near Colombia, Bogotans remember, again, they should be prepared for this kind of disasters, but they (we) don’t. Around noon, someone who had nothing best to do, called several companies and government offices, pretending to be an engineer of Ingeominas (Colombia’s geological institute), and told them that an earthquake was going to take place in the city around 5 PM. The emergency hotlines, as well as the National Seismologic Network phone lines, collapsed. The rumour had been around since several days ago.

Even though most people with some education -or with some kind of common sense- know that earthquakes can’t be predicted (so far, of course), some buildings, specially downtown, started to be evacuated, and panic started. As you can see in the video, a surveillance worker for a military hospital told Caracol TV: “the order was to evacuate the [normal] people, not the patients”.

Nevertheless, the fear a big earthquake will strike Bogotá someday is by no means groundless. As Víctor Solano reminds us:

All the city of Bogotá is located in an intermediate seismic threat area. (…) the impact of an earthquake in Bogotá would be huge because the norms for an earthquake resistant architecture were adopted too late and that’s why 80 per cent of the buildings could collapse loudly.

Solano also criticized the media coverage and asked them to be more “responsible”. For example, some media outlets, like El Tiempo or Caracol Radio, claimed the National University of Colombia campus was evacuated, which wasn’t true (later they corrected the wrong information they provided).

The worst thing is that for almost two centuries a “prophecy” by father Francisco Margallo y Duquesne rings the ears of a lot of Bogotans every August: “The 31 August a year I won’t tell / successive earthquakes will destroy Santafé” (Bogotá’s colonial name, which was taken up again on 1991-2000). Although in 1917 (when several earthquakes actually struck the then big town) and 1973 the Margallo prophecy was about to be fulfilled, the last time Bogotá has been hit by a high magnitude earthquake was February 1967. On May there was an earthquake which left no victims (it was a Saturday around midnight, so I didn’t feel it). Maybe some people let themselves sway because of the date. In a Catholic country, is not strange to find some devote souls asking to go back into praying, as if a natural disaster was a punishment from God. The fans of the “triangle of life” hoax also show up on the forums. Of course, not everyone is so ignorant.

Bogotá’s mayor office has been working for years in a campaign in order to teach Bogotans what to do and how to prevent these events. Though the campaign has been praised, it seems that, if you see what happened on Tuesday, most people don’t take heed of it. As Hodracirk says, “it was a flashmob known only by one person” (the pranker, of course). It seems that, on one side, that campaign and everything we can do in order to learn how to prevent these disasters need to be spread. On the other, that we must be responsible and not to believe everything we find or read on the net. Ignorance is not just “daring”, as we use to say here, it may also be dangerous.

Taxi drivers block Bogotá streets in protest [video]

Last Friday (27 July), Bogotá woke up with its main avenues blocked. The powerful taxi drivers’ group did it in protest because 8 of them have been murdered this year, the latest one, Mario Orlando Velásquez, 39, on Thursday night. The above 17-minutes Caracol TV report, broadcast at Friday noon (and co-presented by lovely Silvia Corzo), summarizes the chaos and everything most Bogotans had to go through in order to arrive to their workplaces or their schools or colleges.

It was too late when Bogotá mayor, leftist Luis Eduardo Garzón, himself elected mostly because of the votes of groups as the taxi and bus drivers’, ordered police to dissolve the protest and unblock the streets by force, after the local government and the taxi drivers’ representatives concerted a meeting for talks toward the resolution of their concerns around 10:00. The following video, posted by a left-wing group magazine, shows the police abuses in some points of the city. One taxi driver says they’re fighting for their own lives:

Since the Transmilenio system was blocked (their drivers were caught playing parqués), and some bus drivers joined the protest, people had to walk, ride a bicycle or trucks (even TV crew vans) in order to get to their destinations. Despite most people agree the drivers’ reasons to protest are fair and right, a lot of them don’t endorse the way they chose. The latest location unblocked was Quirigua, a neighbourhood northwest of the city, where the traffic started to flow again after 12:30.