TENERIFE FLOODS

We don't have rivers in Tenerife - that brown flood you see is the run-off from the storm of 10th and 11th and 12th December, during which more rain fell than we have had in the last eight years combined!
While I was taking this photo I had to move to make way for a lorry tipping mud scraped from the twin road tunnels at Guaza.  http://www.islandconnections.eu/ showed the state of affairs there on Wednesday with this photo. That's the TF1 autopista on top of that wall beneath which are the twin tunnels. To exacerbate matters, half of the autopista was covered in landslides.

Tuesday and Wednesday we followed the advice to stay at home but by today - Thursday - we were stir-crazy, and the rain had stopped, so we set off to our local shopping village, Las Galletas.
The road was closed. So was the alternative route past the petrol station - and this is why.

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 Another run-off down another barranco that goes behind the banana plantations at Guaza had cut the back road to Silencio completely.
So I left the OH drinking coffee at the cafe and walked towards the village to find out why the road was closed. It wasn't difficult.

The raging river you see behind me in the previous photo had found the sea - via the seafront road, the promenade and the beach.

I'll leave you with a few more images of the power of water - and we in the south of Tenerife came off lightly compared with some.

This young man, having leapt from one mini-island to another, obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valour and legged it back home.

PARQUE ROADS - the saga continues!

When the Cabildo improved the TF-655 road from Guaza to Chafiras a few years ago, they levelled out the highs and lows and straightened the bends, but one fifty-metre stretch in Parque de la Reina was left untouched - the houses whose front doors open onto the road would probably collapse if disturbed.

This stretch is a blind hump from both directions with a 40K speed limit that isn't low enough - but drivers ignore that anyway. The only relatively safe place to cross is actually on the brow where your silhouette would be easier to see, but people walk - or run - over on one side to go to Maxcoop supermarket, and on the other side the little old ladies from the little old houses wander across, presumably putting their faith in the Almighty.

Then this week we saw machinery nearby. Was it possible the Cabildo weas about to level it out?

Between downpours, the machine dug out the rough ground at the edge, a metre wide and two metres deep. A man with a stop/go sign stood on the brow of the hill all day, causing even more delays to traffic already diverted away from the collapsed autopista slip road (see earlier posts)

And then at nine o'clock this morning I watched as they began to fill it in again! With picon - small gravel from the volcanic store which comprises Tenerife.


So presumably all they're going to do is cover it with tarmac and go.
Leaving an extra metre for the cars that already zoom over it so fast that their wheels leave the road, and for the cyclists who struggle over it three abreast to spread out even further.

Nice one, Cabildo!