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an anthill and watch the creatures scramble. A washout of an old trouble
spot on the Lake Arenal highway has set humans scrambling. An aguacero
(torrential downpour, in this instance) on August 30 washed out what
looks like a 30 to 40-foot section of the fairly recently repaired
road just on the Tilaran side of the junction to Sabalito." In
all my 17 years of living here," wrote Ginny Lamont, "I've
never seen so much water dump from the sky in 20 minutes. I was almost
in a panic." Ginny is fortunate to live on the Tilaran side of
the break. Sharon Baker was also on the Tilaran side of the break
at the moment of collapse - and witnessed it, I hear - but lives in
Sabalito and so had to spend the night in Tilaran as did many other
north-side residents , who stayed in hotels or with friends. Persons
who absolutely have to get from one side of the lake to the other
can take a bus to the break, walk through the deep muddy gully and
board a bus on the other side. Otherwise, through traffic is possible
by using a back road from Sabalito to the Upala Highway, thence on
the Interamerican to Canas and up to Tilaran. The usual stream of
tourist vans, buses, and rental cars traveling between the Arenal
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Volcano
and the Pacific beaches or the Liberia airport could be going the
very much longer way from La Fortuna to Upala and down to the Interamerican.
Possibly some tourists are "scrambling' via the boat and van
route to Monteverde from where they can get to the Interamerican.
The road,
repaired and surfaced with blessed blacktop last year, was ill constructed
to withstand the aguacero, a thin layer of asphalt topping at least
a dozen feet of poorly packed soil over a culvert that conveyed
a healthy stream. The famous Roman road-builders would have done
something quite different at that point, but the Roman Empire had
lots more resources. With the aguacero, the healthy stream became
an actual river too big to pass through the alcantaria and treated
the road bed as a poorly done dam, bursting through it easily. A
week later, the chasm remains. A substantial bridge seems necessary
at that spot, but we might as well expect Augustus and his Roman
engineers to come to our rescue. If the road through Rio Chiquito
and El Castillo on the south side of the lake were finished, this
single washout would not be so consequential.
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