In the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a five-year-long downpour imprisons people in their homes, washes away the banana plantation and reduces the town of Macondo to ruins. But the deluge dreamed up by Colombian novelist Gabriel Garca Mrquez in his magical-realist masterpiece pales compared to the real-life flooding of his homeland now.
Amid 11 months of nearly nonstop rain, dykes have burst and rivers have topped their banks, inundating communities, cattle ranches, and croplands in 28 of Colombia’s 32 departments. Waterlogged Andean mountainsides have collapsed, burying neighborhoods and blocking highways. More than 1,000 people have been killed, injured or gone missing. In the flooded town of Puerto Boyac in central Colombia, coffins holding the dead are being floated to the cemetery on boats.
Yet long before the rains hit, Colombian officials had paved the way for this tragedy. They allowed developers to build housing projects in flood plains and failed to shore up retaining walls and dykes. Poorly designed drainage systems mean even modest rain showers can turn streets into lakes. Meanwhile, efforts to design modern highways that can better withstand heavy rains have hit speed bumps. On Tuesday, Colombia’s inspector general suspended Bogot Mayor Samuel Moreno from his post temporarily amid a widening kickbacks scandal involving road-building contracts.
As for the country’s waterways, reengineering has made some even more prone to flooding. “These are natural catastrophes but, essentially, they are man-made,” Bruno Moro, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Colombia, told TIME. A vivid example is the Bogot River, which runs through the capital and has become an all-purpose dumpster for garbage, sewage and industrial runoff. The waste plus the rerouting of streams into the river have swelled water levels, and massive earthen embankments are now required to keep the river on course. To make matters worse, the dykes sometimes fail.
The Universidad de la Sabana , one of the Colombia’s elite academic institutions, sits next to the Bogot River in the capital suburb of Cha. On April 25, the surging river punched a 60-ft.-long hole in a nearby levee. Now, the university’s library, amphitheatre and science laboratories sit five-feet deep in putrid black water. As he climbed into an aluminum boat on a mission to salvage classroom desks and computers, volunteer relief worker Luis Gabriel Angel said: “Nobody imagined the flooding would be this bad.”
Fortunately, the downpours won’t last as long as they did in the fictional Macondo. Forecasters predict the rain will peter out by July. But thanks to global warming and climate change, Colombians should get used to extreme weather, says Ricardo Lozano, who heads the government’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies. He points out that just before the floods, Colombia suffered through a lengthy drought. “It’s wrong to think that climate change is a future threat because it is taking place right now,” Lozano says. “The world should learn from what’s happening in Colombia.”
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