Tough Time In Manaus: The Dry Season Mario Cohn-Haft - November 4, 1997 |
Now the smoke is back, thoughmuch worse than before. Last night even the house next
door (which is practically right up against mine), looked a little blurry as seen from my
living room. This morning, driving in to INPA, you couldnt see past the first facade of
houses along the road. It was like a Hollywood set for a town, or like a really dense fog,
only instead of feeling cool and moist its hot and the air smells smoky and burns your
eyes and clamps down your throat. Its not like any smoke Ive seen before in which you
perceive that it has a source and an end to it somewhere. Its more like a weather
phenomenon, your whole world smothered in smoke.
They say the rivers already at the lowest height on record (and typically it keeps
dropping through December). All kinds of places are landlocked that normally have
boat access. The town of Barcelos, midway up the Rio Negro, is normally a 24-hr boat
ride from Manaus. A friend of ours just went there to spend a week vacation. It took the
entire week for her to get there! She spent the week in the boat, poking upstream in the
smoke, through shallow shoals that no living boatmans ever seen before, occasionally
getting stuck in new sandbars. She arrived in time to catch her flight back to Manaus.
The river in front of Barcelos, which normally is the same mighty, oceanic Rio Negro you
encounter in front of Manaus, is apparently so low you can wade across it!
Another potential problem of the diminishing water level is that the Rio Negro
apparently is dropping to close to the level of the intake pipes for the pumps that supply
the water for town. Along with the shortage of dependable electricity and phone service, were now facing the threat of a water shortage.
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