Hondurans Seek to Bridge Chasm Caused by Storm

EL PORTON DEL INFIERNO, Honduras — Dangerously shifting rapids and a shore lined with eerily shaped boulders led Patuca River folk to call this narrow canyon the Gates of Hell, even before the deluge from tropical storm Mitch swelled the river and crushed their cabins like matchsticks.

Within a couple of weeks, by mid-November, the river had settled back into its channel, but the power of the flood waters left a landscape so altered that even people who grew up here say they get lost now. The biggest change, though, was that Mitch severed the lifeline of an estimated 2,000 ranchers, fishermen, farmers and gold prospectors who eke out a living along the Patuca.

This is just one of the areas isolated when the storm wiped out nearly 200 bridges, hundreds of miles of roads and telephone lines throughout Central America. Each bridge represents hundreds, if not thousands, of isolated people--and thousands of dollars in repair and construction costs, which total more than $3 billion. After agricultural losses, that is the second-largest category of material damage from a storm that took at least 9,000 lives.

Multimillion-dollar reconstruction loans are beginning to flow into storm-battered countries. The U.S. Marines and the Army Corps of Engineers are helping to supply and train skilled labor to restore roads and bridges that barely had recovered from a decade or more of civil wars in the region.

Much of the damage was in rough terrain, where communications and transportation already were difficult. In places such as El Porton del Infierno, people who lived without electricity and telephones before Mitch are now hungry and sleeping on hilltops under trees.

Pipantis, the informal fleet of motorized canoes that form the Patuca’s system of waterborne peddlers and taxis, are nearly idle. Before Mitch, they regularly visited remote river settlements with dry goods brought in from Nueva Palestina, the last town on the only highway into this wilderness.

During the storm, a bridge on the last leg of the highway into Nueva Palestina collapsed into the Guayape River, isolating Nueva Palestina and the people of the Patuca River.

Salt, oil and sugar immediately became scarce. And gasoline to transport them, even scarcer. Donations airlifted into the area on U.S. helicopters helped for a little while, and rafts still bring a small amount of supplies down the river past the destroyed bridge. But those are hardly long-term solutions.

“What I need is to get that bridge fixed,” said a frustrated Thomas Harner, an American gold prospector who spearheaded relief efforts into the backwater that has been his home for a dozen years.

“There are 92 bridges out in this country,” replied U.S. Army Maj. Jose Saucedo, who was coordinating the helicopter relief effort. “This is just one of them.”

Actually, there are 94, with an additional 80 in Nicaragua and about a dozen in Guatemala and El Salvador. Reconstruction must take place one bridge, one stretch of washed-out highway, one telephone line at a time. The Guatemalan government pledged to have traffic flowing again quickly, but in Honduras and Nicaragua, the most damaged countries, rebuilding is expected to take years.

Central Americans Devise Alternatives

Meanwhile, Central Americans sit in long lines, waiting to cross improvised or temporary bridges, or they devise alternatives. The only way from eastern to western El Salvador is either across the top of a dam or over a railroad bridge, one lane of cars at a time.

Either route involves a wait of up to three hours. Extra police had to patrol the lines that formed during holidays to discourage marauders from preying on travelers.

Whole communities and office buildings try to get along without telephones. Honduras alone lost 16,000 telephone lines at an estimated cost of $149 million. The destroyed lines include those at the Education Ministry, which was moved to phoneless temporary headquarters after its offices were flooded.

Officials there tried to replace waterlogged textbooks, find substitutes for destroyed schools and prepare registration lists in time for classes to restart--all without telephones.

The loss of the bridge on the main highway between Honduras and Nicaragua, far southwest of El Porton del Infierno, challenged Honduran innovation. Sugar cane farmers, who lost their crop in the storm, picked up about $1 a trip towing cars across a shallow patch downstream.

Cars lined up on the riverbank, where tractors backed up to their front bumpers. Chains were locked onto the car chassis, and the tractors slowly pulled the cars through the swiftly moving river to the opposite shore.

For bus passengers like the Castillo family, who needed to get over the river from southern Honduras to Tegucigalpa, the capital, for 18-month-old Jagdier Antonio’s medical checkup, fishermen set up a ferry service. A bus dropped passengers on one side of the washed-out bridge, they scrambled down a steep riverbank, paid about 8 cents to be ferried across the river and climbed up the other side, where a bus picked them up.

A Patched-Together Ferry Service

The system worked, but in emergencies it was exasperatingly slow. Ambulance driver Gilberto Mendoza had to fight to control his anxiety as he helped a 3-year-old burn victim and a pregnant woman who thought that she had blood poisoning. He left one of his two ambulances on each side of the river--a system similar to the buses.

“If I drive the ambulances across the river every day, I am going to ruin the engine,” he said, explaining why he did not cross at the shallow spot.

The cavalry--or rather, U.S. Marine Corps engineers--rode into town in late December. The 54 Marines set up Camp Holiday a few yards from the river and, with the help of 24 Honduran soldiers, stretched a temporary, one-lane bridge across the river in less than two weeks.

The Honduran government paid for the bridge with part of an emergency loan from the World Bank.

“It’s like a giant erector set,” Capt. Dwayne Whiteside explained about the 160-foot Acrow bridge, a modern version of the legendary Bailey bridges that have moved troops over canyons and rivers. This erector set, though, has to be put together with near-perfect precision to snap into its fittings on the other side of the river.

Sections of the metal bridge were clipped into place, 10 feet at a time and pushed across the river until the bridge was finished in late December. It was the first time the Marines had built this particular type of structure.

“The way the world is changing, we can see ourselves doing as many of these missions as any other missions,” Whiteside said of the reconstruction effort. “These are meant to be temporary bridges, but we are building them as if they were going to be here for a long time.”

Indeed, an earlier version was placed over the Lempa, El Salvador’s largest river, in 1981, when rebels blew up the graceful, expansion Golden Bridge near the beginning of a 12-year civil war. The temporary structure remained there until Mitch washed it away.

Because the region needs so many temporary bridges, governments are putting up a single lane in most places. That means a lot of waiting on busy highways as cars and trucks cross, one lane at a time. What is usually a three-hour drive from Nicaragua’s capital, Managua, to the western farm region of Chinandega can now take five hours.

Collapsed bridges mean near-chaos in an already crowded urban setting like Tegucigalpa, which is bisected by waterways. The rivers that Mitch filled with flood waters are now barriers separating workers’ houses from their jobs, necessitating long detours that contribute to rush-hour gridlock.

The worst difficulties are in crossing the canyons that the Choluteca River carved between downtown Tegucigalpa and Comayaguela, both crowded business districts. The Marine engineers also installed a temporary bridge there.

Still, the effects are most devastating in places like El Porton del Infierno, deep in the eastern Honduran province of Olancho, among the poorest and most remote provinces in a poor country.

People here do not miss telephones or even electricity, which they never had. What they miss are goods like salt and oil that now come down the river less often and at higher prices.

“People cannot do their marketing,” said Cristina Guzman, one of the Patuca River residents gathered at Javier Licona’s dry goods store and primitive cheese factory, the only building that has been rebuilt among the dozen houses that once stood on the banks at El Porton del Infierno.

Desperate for food, most river folk have not even thought of how to get materials to rebuild the modest shacks that Mitch destroyed. Lucky families have found driftwood for lean-tos. Others are living in the open, exposed to mosquitoes.

“Prices are so high that no one can buy anything,” said Epifanio Reyes, a 40-year-old farmer, who lost his corn crop as well as his house and now lives with friends.

Shopkeeper Licona, a 25-year-old in a wide-brimmed, white straw hat, explained the higher prices:

Because delivery trucks cannot get into Nueva Palestina, gasoline prices have doubled and so have pipanti fares.

In addition, his suppliers are charging him about 50% more for products. So, Licona acknowledged, his prices also have gone up, some as much as doubling.

He has tried to reduce his profits, he said, because he realizes that his neighbors have neither money nor the opportunities to earn it. But he has to make enough money to resupply the store, or he will end up with no inventory.

Pipanti driver Ramiro Sanchez said, there is, as usual, only one real solution along the Patuca: “Most people just do without.”

An extensive list of organizations helping victims of tropical storm Mitch is available on The Times’ Web site at http://ziira.shop/relief.