Flooding in Palermo February 28, 2008 © MartĂn Zabala
Text by Fernanda Sández
“It is hard to believe that Buenos Aires has a beginning. I think of it being as eternal as water and air.”
Jorge Luis Borges, The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires
“With a rope, like in the circus,” Rosa says laughing, remembering what it took to cross the street by her house last November 13th. “We tied a rope to a lamppost, crossed the other end to the far side, and tied it to another lamppost. We had been told that the electricity was off, because if it hadn’t been…”
Almost two and a half inches of rain fell on Buenos Aires that day — more than double the capacity of the city’s stormwater system. Parts of the system date from the 19th century and the creaky old thing behaves like a bad-tempered patient administered unpleasant medicine: it’ll tolerate a few drops but give it a spoonful and it’ll spit it right back at you. In technical terms that means if there is no more than 1.2 inches of rain, and it falls steadily, over the course of at least an hour, things are okay. But if the volume is greater than that, or if it falls in a heavy downpour, old Buenos Aires belches the water back up to the surface. Under the proliferating veneer of high-rise towers few are aware of the true city of aging, inadequate pipes until rainwater erupts from storm drains, from sewers, and from the channelized streams over which the new city has been built.
Boating in the streets of Belgrano © Viv Dehaes
In Buenos Aries water is eternal.
“I’ve lived in Palermo for 32 years and it has always been this way,” says Eduardo Molina. “This” being the lagoon that forms near Puente PacĂfico after every heavy shower. In the Palermo neighborhood, only ten minutes from the center of Buenos Aires, a moderately intense rain will generate a high tide of sorts that laps at the cars. Pedestrians are reduced to swimming across the avenues or, as Rosa did, roping across. Like in the circus.
After the rains come the cameras. The media is perpetually enchanted with these spectacles — the woman paddling a rubber raft; the car sailing down the street. There is the oft-repeated line: “Hey buddy, look, Venice!” And the quip that fed-up residents reformulated into a political motto: “Aquaman for Mayor.” And the joke that has it that Palermo, a neighborhood so proud of its cosmopolitan nature that is boasts areas called Hollywood, Soho, and Queens, might just as well add Amsterdam to its roster; after all, it has an endlessly flooding corner where anyone nostalgic for that sub-sea-level city can, literally, experience Holland through his soggy feet.
But it isn’t always funny. No matter how much people joke about the rivers coursing down every street in Belgrano, Palermo, and Villa Crespo — the areas most prone to what is called “the flagellation of the floods” — there is something exasperating about a city that is drowned by every rainstorm. There were floods on November 13, 2009, and on January 29, 2008, and on so many other days, not least of which January 26, 2001.
The flood of January 2001 was marked by a single, terrible difference. Five women in the Belgrano neighborhood weren’t able to entertain themselves with comments about the floods the day after. Their names were Wenceslada Firpo, Delfina Castro, Eliana Garibaldi, Isabel Salazar, and Celina Mariani. Isabel was the eldest, almost one hundred years old; the youngest was Delfina, 76. They were not related but lived together at Los Girasoles, a nursing home on Superà Street. The street has a peculiarity: it runs along the floor of a ravine below a railroad bank that becomes a dam on rainy days. The surrounding streets can become blocked with branches and trash, too, compounding the problem. On that afternoon in 2001 all of that happened and more.
Wenceslada, Delfina, Eliana, Isabel, and Celina dozed in a basement room of Los Girasoles. Bedridden, none of them could move. None knew how to swim. When the firemen arrived, they found five drowned women with long white hair floating in a room filled to the ceiling with water. There was a trial and, seven years later, a verdict. The culprit? Rain. “It is impossible to get past the infernal quantity of water that fell,” read the findings of the court.
Flooding in Palermo February 28, 2008 © MartĂn Zabala
Flooding in Palermo February 28, 2008 © MartĂn Zabala
The city of Buenos Aires is built on a swampy plain along the banks of the RĂo de la Plata © Pablo Corral Vega
Moving sand
Buenos Aires is built on lowland pampas, a plain furrowed by streams, alongside the RĂo de la Plata. The rĂo in the river’s name, and the plata, silver, are for show only; the waterway is in fact an estuary of brownish waters. The city was founded within the arms of five sizeable streams and six smaller creeks. “These waterways absorb the natural run-off and the subsequent flow can accumulate the force of an avalanche,” says historian Enrique Herz, “undermining walls, scouring streets, and pooling into lagoons impossible to cross.”
Buenosaireans display a disdain for the watery place on which their city is located that harks back to its earliest days. “People took advantage of the streams to dump whatever old rags or garbage they had around the house,” Herz says. “It was simply what everyone did.” It was almost three hundred years — from the founding of the city by Juan de Garay in 1580 until Torcuato de Alvear became mayor in 1885 – before Buenos Aires covered over the open arroyos.
Covering the arroyos improved sanitation but it didn’t solve the flooding. In fact it worsened the problem, as houses, high rises, and roads were built on the reclaimed land — Avenue Juan B. Justo, for instance, runs over the Maldonado arroyo. The development changed Buenos Aires’s appearance but didn’t affect its native topography. The arroyos still mark the city like the long scars of a knife fighter’s face, and it’s no coincidence that streets built in streambeds flood whenever it rains.
The Palace of Water
An “architectonic shell,” some call it. A fictitious palace built in honor of the water and sewer pipes that serve Buenos Aires, the queen of the RĂo de la Plata. It takes up an entire block in the heart of Buenos Aires, and many regard it as one of the city’s most beautiful buildings. Its candied façade looks like the witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel, especially striking when the sun flashes off its 300,000 tiles and enameled bricks. Topped by a green slate roof brought piecemeal from the quarries of France, it resembles a giant pastry, a celestial meringue. It’s called the Palace of Water.
The palace was completed in 1894 — years ahead of Argentina’s centenary, though it shines like an fairy-tale birthday cake. Everything about the palace is an illusion. Where there appear to be doors, enormous windows, and even columns there is nothing but a solid facade. And within the building’s extravagant walls stand twelve gigantic tanks, now empty, that once stored 72 million liters of the city’s drinking water.
Why go to so much effort? Why build a trompe l´oeil? To make a production over something that is normally buried underground couldn’t be more absurd or more Argentine, most Argentines would say. It was the gesture of a peacock of a country, one where, in those days, such flourishes didn’t seem quite so capricious. The idea was that the building should “serve as a monument to the infrastructure in which appreciable resources had been invested but which did not offer sufficient visible evidence to inspire appropriate faith in their actual magnitude because most of it is hidden underground,” writes Martial Candioti, in his book, The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Building of the Federal Capital.
In the century since the palace was erected little else has been done to maintain or improve the sewers and water mains, even as the city has undergone tremendous change and growth. Three million people live in Buenos Aires today; throw in the metropolitan area and the number swells to ten million. The city includes districts such as Puerto Madero, where a single square foot of land is worth US $500, and others such as Villa 21 and Bajo Flores, crammed with hundreds of miserable shanties, where potable water and sewers are but pipe dreams.
The latest published study on the subject, prepared by three international NGOs, found that 3.5 million residents do not have access to purified water from the city’s supply, nor are most of their houses connected to the city sewer. Instead they depend for water on wells sunk into the Pampeano aquifer, and for sewerage on inadequate septic tanks built too close to the water table. Now the Pampeano aquifer from which so many residents draw water is contaminated with fecal matter and toxic material coming from garbage dumps and open-air burning.
The terrible towers
Here again, Buenos Aires prefers to be reflected in a false mirror. Just as it once built a hollow palace to celebrate buried pipes, today it celebrates an above-ground splendor also not entirely what it appears to be.
Buildings in the Palermo neighborhood © Pablo Corral Vega
Buenos Aires is 15th on the list of cities with the largest number of skyscrapers. There are 420 of the towers, which puts Buenos Aires ahead of Shanghai and Dubai, worldwide, and second only to Mexico City within Latin America. Highrises continue to multiple throughout the city, though technically many fall short of skyscraper height. Thus a patch of land that used to hold a single house with a single bathroom, now supports a multi-story building with ten or more apartments and a corresponding number of toilets, showers, and baths.
“It is for this reason that we talk of `urbanization of the wild,’” says architect Osvaldo Guerrica EchavarrĂa, of the Assembly of Urban Green Spaces (APEVU). The term refers to a phenomenon directly associated with unregulated building: the incremental waterproofing of the ground. That is, as there is more cement and fewer green spaces in the city, there is less ground that can absorb rainfall. Buenos Aires has just 19 square feet of public green space per person, less than ten percent of the 215 square feet that is considered ideal. And if precipitation is intense, as it has been recently, resulting in heavy rainfall over a brief period of time, the sort of thing that happened last November 13th is possible; a downpour can drown some neighborhoods in minutes.
Climate change exacerbates the problem, scientists believe, increasing the frequency of extreme weather events like the recent rain, says Pablo Suárez from the Climate Center of the International Red Cross. “But climate change combines with other factors such as uncontrolled urbanization so that when it rains less water filters into the ground and more water remains on the surface.”
The same phenomenon has happened in other parts of the world in recent months — Dakar, Senegal; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Manila in the Philippines have all experienced it. The bottom line, says Suárez, is that the climate is changing, “and we must change with it.”
Monte Matadero, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, is one of the areas most exposed to flooding. The channelized arroyos overflow easily. © Verónica Bellomo
The liquid question
Pablo Bruno is the national coordinator of the Disasters Program for the Argentine Red Cross. Surprisingly, he is somewhat optimistic. Or, like a good Argentine, he is consoled by thinking that everything could be worse. A few cars turning into sailing vessels every now and then and some thousands of dollars in merchandise lost in fact isn’t such a calamity. “One can say that there have been improvements in the city’s ability to deal with the floods. We saw that on November 13th when 2.5 inches of rain fell on Buenos Aires. Fifteen years ago that would have stopped the city. What has happened is that recently is that once again the rains have exceeded the volumes the system is designed to handle,” Bruno explains.
The city lacks infrastructure. But history shows that even the most vital projects have been only been undertaken in the wake of disaster — disasters that could have been avoided if the work had been done beforehand, as it should have been. The drinking-water system was built in 1869 after cholera outbreaks killed hundreds in 1867 and 1868. The sewers were finally built in the convulsion of public-health outrage that followed the deaths of thousands in the great yellow fever epidemic of 1871.
Pablo Bereciartúa, Chair of Water Risk at the Engineering School of the National University of Buenos Aires. © Verónica Bellomo
Public works projects operate “on demand,” and as the floods in Buenos Aires have not yet reached tragic dimensions, there hasn’t yet been sufficient demand from the public. So everything remains essentially as it has been for the better part of a century. Pablo Bereciartúa, an engineer who is the Chair of Water Risk at the Engineering School of the National University of Buenos Aires and until recently Infrastructure Director for the city, describes the state of affairs. “The last significant projects done in Buenos Aires date back to 1940. Since then, only a few pumping stations have been added and some protective walls built in the Barracas and La Boca neighborhoods.”
In Bereciartúa’s view, more serious than the absence of improvements in infrastructure is the almost total lack of data on which to base decisions. “The city has no comprehensive water monitoring system that would let us understand and regulate things more effectively. There is no data,” Bereciartúa says. “In this situation, it is only possible to move forward blindly, trusting in some magical outcome, as if it were possible to make decisions in the absolute absence of technical information.”
Thus the city is counting on a water plan formulated two governments back. The first government secured a US $130 million loan from the World Bank, and its successor put the plan into effect, starting the actual projects. The plan calls for the construction of two great tunnels from the Maldonado arroyo which would, in theory, carry excess rainwater to the river. The bidding for this enormous project was won by the Italian company Ghella, which partnered with two local companies, IECSA and Creaurbán. IECSA specializes in large public works projects. Creaurbán builds high-rises; the two tallest buildings in Puerto Madero bear its seal. Until a year ago, both companies belonged to the father of the present head of government, Mauricio Macri. Today, Macri’s cousin, the architect Angelo Calcaterra, runs them.
The city of Buenos Aires sits on lowland pampas, a plain once plaited with rivers, streams and wetlands, now completely covered over by development. © Alejandro Gómez/Flickr Creative Commons
The chimera of the lake.
Eight years ago — two months before Wenceslada and her companions drowned — a neighborhood group in Puente PacĂfico concluded that whatever magical solutions proposed by the authorities invariably produced an identical outcome: the corner of Santa Fe and Juan B. Justo turned into an enormous lake. They thought, “A lake. Why not?” Initially the idea seemed improbable but with time and the growing support of more and more neighbors (among them geologists, civil engineers, hydraulic engineers, and biologists) the ingenious solution began to take form. It became the Pacific Lake Project.
The plan includes the creation of an artificial lake almost half a mile long in an area which, at the moment, remains undeveloped land. The lake would be divided in two parts: a deeper, permanent lake surrounded by trees and recreational paths, and a shallower portion that could act as an on-demand reservoir, absorbing rainwater. This second lake, according to the project description, would have “a capacity to capture nearly 9,000,000 cubic feet of water,” a volume sufficient to deal with the floods that inundate the neighborhood.
The idea won the support of 11,800 local residents and the National Technological University. In 2004 it even gained the backing of 40 of the city’s 62 legislators. Nevertheless the project has not moved beyond commission-level debates. At one time “Pro-Lake” neighborhood meetings had 300 people in attendance; today perhaps 15 or 20 turn up for them. “We got tired,” admits one woman who declines to give her name. “It is impossible to fight against the vested interests of civil servants and business executives. We were thinking about green spaces, and they were thinking about green dollars.”
The few who persist are here at the Alfredo Palacios Foundation on a warm Friday night, listening to the voice of the president of the Pacific Lake Neighborhood Association, architect Rodolfo Rossi. The man has the bearing of an English admiral, and the powerful voice of someone who commands a fleet. It is a pity that what he leads is just a struggling proposal, as he himself says. “The Pacific Lake Project has many things to recommend it: it is simple, it would cost a tenth of what the current plan would cost. But it has one thing going against it. It does not allow for enough business.” Giving in to pique, he continues, “However, the tunnel project generates business in two ways. There are the tunnels themselves, and there will be the sale of the land which will become available because of the work. In those twelve hectares there will be room for seventeen towers and parking garages.” He adds, “For five years our association has raised concerns about the technical impossibility of the tunnel project, to the point that a judge ordered the digging stopped. But the city government does not care about such things.”
Still, there are some, like Bereciartúa, who believe the tunnels will work. “Tests with a model have been enough to verify that the project will work technically. Objections based on the issue of cost are another matter,” he says. But for Rossi and all who have gathered here today, the tunnels are nothing more than another beautiful, empty castle. The latest, and perhaps most expensive version of the Palace of Water. “Justice said that we were right, but the work continues. Not only because of business, but also because it coincides with something very Argentine: the idea of hiding,” Rossi says. He adds quietly, “I was in the tunnels this very afternoon. Wastewater from them is already infiltrating the Puelche aquifer. It’s going to contaminate it. And this, at a moment when fresh water is a high-priority issue worldwide, is really a crime, a crime against humanity”.
Nobody says anything. This sort of shipwreck is not the place for speeches.
Thank you. Very helpful post.