It turned out that the helicopters were not doing anything about a bridge, but were installing poles to restore some electricity supplies.
Last week, however, we heard that the bridge to Castagnetoli had been reopened, so we went to take a look. As you will see, it is more a triumph of ingenuity than a triumph of engineering. The few remnants of the old bridge have simply been abandoned, and this new, low, river crossing has been created out of steel tubes and stones. According to the local paper, money from the disaster relief fund has been allocated to replace the bridge, but I have no idea when that might be done. In the meantime, however, this works!
Stuff has really been going on! A few days ago I walked up the hill and saw that the bridge to Castagnetoli was in exactly the same state (see earlier post), and the only activity was the harvesting of fallen trees. If and when there was going to be any attempt to replace this bridge, I have no idea.
To be quite honest, I also have no idea whether this morning’s activity has anything to do with the bridge, but I can’t think of any other explanation. I had heard a little helicopter activity early on, but didn’t think much of it, as helicopters have been around quite a lot over the last two or three weeks carrying emergency supplies, surveying and so on. But when I took the dogs out I saw there were two of them parked in the village! One in the bit of waste ground that serves as a car park for the social club, one in a tiny field next to it. As the morning has gone by they have been ferrying large buckets (I can’t think of a better word) of concrete from mixer trucks to a place that can not be more than 1 minute’s flight away. Pictures and video follow.
Coming in with an empty bucket:
Changing buckets:
Video (yes, I got grit and twigs in my hair taking this):
The epicenter of the storm on 25 October was Brugnato, in the Val di Vara, which is just about 8 miles as the crow flies south-west of where we live. By road, it would be a great deal further, as there are mountains reaching up to 1000 m in between. They recorded what is described as the “appalling” amount of 540 mm in less than 24 hours . One might bear in mind that according to figures I’ve just looked up, Birmingham receives an average of 762 mm in a whole year. 455 mm were recorded at Calice al Cornoviglio, and the third place in the figures I saw was taken by Pontremoli itself, , just a little north of here. The station recorded 376.4 mm (including 370.8 on Tuesday) – almost exactly half of Birmingham’s annual rainfall. They have been keeping records therefore 120 years, and this was the highest figure ever recorded. The previous figure was a “mere” 282 mm, measured on August 25, 1952. Monterosso appeared quite a lot on the news, as it is a particularly attractive, though tiny, tourist destination on the coast, where huge damage was done by the floodwater and mud running through the town. They recorded 320 mm.
Picture above is near the bridge just down the road.
I know that this has been on the national news in other countries, but probably not for long. In case anybody was worried, the first thing is that we are okay.
In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me just mention that after a very dry summer and an extraordinarily summery late September and early October, rain started in this region on Tuesday evening. The papers are saying that in some spots there was more than 20 inches of rain in eight or nine hours. To put that in context, in England the annual average total rainfall is about 33 inches.
At first I thought we had it bad with the following:
4 cm water in the office, which called for mopping up, but no serious damage was done
12 hours without tapwater
18 hours without electricity (so no gas heating either)
24 hours without telephone
30+ hours without Internet
We were also aware of road and bridge closures.
As we learn more about what had happened it became clear that we were lucky. The next village up the hill was cut off (as far as I know it still is). The town over the other hill has been completely inaccessible, helicopter drops of essential food were being made. At the last count (I haven’t looked this morning) there were at least 6 dead and 8 missing in the area, so we got away with it relatively lightly! The area has officially been declared a disaster area, with central government funds promised to help cope.
I have a few photographs of my own, and I may, given time, edit this post to make it more specific. The river that flows not far past the bottom of the garden has, for instance, significantly changed course. But in the meantime, you can get some impression from the links below.
If you want to find more, you can search “Alluvione” (flood) along with words like Pontremoli, Aulla or Lunigiana.
And here’s a first update: 250 people were evacuated from Mulazzo, which is one “side valley” from ours, also having a river or creek that flows down to the Magra.
And here is a picture of what you find if you try to go up our valley to Castagnetoli, the village about 1 km up from us. You don’t get through – it’s one of the places to which helicopters are flying with essential supplies:
Update: the marble is already spoken for! I’ll remove this post in a few days.
This is not really a blog post, just a place for people to come and see the picture.
I have heard it said that marble has become so expensive that people are even stealing name-plaques off walls and that kind of thing. So maybe somebody would like this?
There are between 25 and 30 pieces of marble. Many of them are about a metre long or slightly more, but some are shorter. They are generally either about 3/4 inch or about 1.5 inches thick, and mostly between 6 inches and a foot wide. It is whitish, with a pale grey marbling. The majority are more or less rectangular, but some have corners cut off or diagonal ends. A few have residues of cement clinging to them, and I assume they were taken out of a kitchen or something similar when this house was refurbished a few years ago.
If anybody wants them you can have them for nothing, but there are two conditions: the first is that you come and fetch them yourself (it’s a few minutes away from the Pontremoli autostrada access); the second is that you take all of them at one go.
It is not for me to compare myself with a polymath such as Leonardo da Vinci. It is therefore with enormous modesty that I inform you of my recent award.
As background, I remind you that in 2003 I won first prize in the Ballydehob Busking Competition. This triumph was underlined a year or two later by winning second prize, an accolade even more to be valued for the fact that, unlike 2003, the competition now had multiple entrants!
But now we move our focus from music to photography. Last night, at the high point of the village summer feast, it was announced that I had won the first annual village photographic competition, with the theme of “La Pietra” – “Stone”.
Here it is:
(You can click for higher resolution)
The title would be “Crava Morta”, which is the name for the section of river that flows past 50 m from the bottom of the garden. It means something like either “Dead Goat” or “Goat Death” in local dialect. As far as I know, however, that is just a name whose origins were lost long ago. The frequency with which goats turn up dead there does not appear to be unusual. I did go down to the river several times looking for exactly the right stone in the right light. But don’t worry – the risk of injury I took for the sake of my art, clambering around the river in rubber boots that only leaked slightly, tripod and camera in hand, was minimal.
The first I came across in my working life, so I will not mention the source:
This team of visionaries has worked passionately to develop the next generation of a service management solution, based on innovative and revolutionary technologies.
Translation: they have written some software that works quite well
The second is from the Yahoo! “Groups blog”:
Over the past few months, we have been evaluating your feedback on the new Groups experience that we have been testing with some groups for several months. Based on that feedback, we have decided to rollback the new Groups experience starting this Wednesday, January 12. We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward. Thanks for your feedback and thoughts throughout this process.
Translation: we are cancelling some bad changes we made.
I’m particularly fond of “We will instead iterate on the current interface going forward.” See, there is still a need for courses in how to write! (Or maybe it’s “how to think”?)
The story so far: about two weeks ago much of a tooth that I had filled 20 years ago in Hamburg fell out. There was no pain, so having found a dentist, an appointment was made for a couple of days later. In spite of having made an appointment there was a very long wait. This was no great surprise – dentists and doctors are like that, but I did make a quip to Sarah: “They charge a lot for their own time, but they never give you a rebate for making you wait!” The temporary filling was paid for, and a new appointment made.
I returned a week later for further investigation – there was no charge, as the main filling was to be done at the third appointment, which was yesterday.
I arrived in good time, armed with a book of nearly 800 pages that I am slowly reading at the moment. Clever, eh? And a good thing too – it was 50 minutes before I went in to the treatment room, and after the technician had cleaned out the temporary filling, I then had to lie on the chair for another 20 or more minutes, gripping a piece of cotton wool between my teeth at the offending site, before the dentist came to do the more skilled work of recreating the tooth.
And now the surprise. After checking that the word-play in a statement such as “you have been very patient patient” worked in English, as apparently it does in Italian, the dentist told me that today’s tooth was free! “Time is money,” he said, “that is my philosophy. And I know that is true for you as well.”
I would say that I was gobsmacked, but I wouldn’t want to knock this new tooth out.
Contact me if you’re looking for a dentist near Aulla!
Nature is a bit unfamiliar here. Fireflies – I’d never seen them before this time last year, but they are quite magical. A very large grass-snake lives near the church, and there is at least one baby in the compost heap. On the way back from Chianti last week I spotted a golden eagle. And here is a friend I met the other night just outside the back of the house:
This isn’t the interesting, focussed blog you might have been looking for…
"Pica Pica" is, as I'm sure you knew, the name for the common magpie. It's no more than a collection of bits and pieces I wanted to make available for friends and family. I have other blogs for dharma related material (at DangZang), and a small one for translation at my work site.
At last the catalogue project that I began so long ago has reached a sort of completion. Improvement will always be possible, through more detail and ironing out mistakes. But at least I now know what I’ve got, and will avoid that embarrassing moment when you start reading a wonderful text that you ordered from […]
Happiness is booming: its stock is riding high. In 2012 you will be able, for a mere thousand Australian dollars, to take part in a conference on “Happiness and its causes” in Sydney. Unless, that is, you happen to want to join the additional workshops, which take another 700 dollars or more out of […]
