The Mud Slide

A few weeks ago, we woke up to a lot of heavy equipment noise. I finally got up from my rocking chair to go have a look outside to see what in the world was going on. At the bottom of our street, I saw a big yellow excavator. Now why on earth would there be one at the bottom of our street?? As I was standing out side, in my pj's!, friends of ours that live close to us walked by. So we asked them if they knew what was going on. Of course they did, because they were out walking around!

What happened was a major land slide between the houses on the opposite side of our street and the houses on Amole 3, the street next to us. There is a stream/run-off between the houses, and the mud slide followed that down. Thankfully!!! Not one house was ruined in all of this. Or more importantly, no one was hurt!

This happened around 1 o'clock in the morning. Chris and I did NOT hear a thing. All our neighbors were out on the street, and we slept through the whole thing!

You see, we get so much rain here some days that land slides are a normal occurrence. For instance, yesterday I was playing volleyball, and it rained so hard for 10+ minutes that you couldn't hear anything in the gym. We probably got five inches of rain in those 10 minutes! So lots of rain mixed with mountains, sometimes is not a great recipe!

This first picture was taken at the top of our street. There is a bridge on the other side of the debris pile. Well what was left of the bridge... :) The top of this pile probably reached 5 feet. It was probably 30 to 40 feet long and 20 feet wide.

This was on the other side of the pile above. The slide took out the guard rails. We thought they were going to have to redo the whole bridge, but the cement was still ok. However, there were a few chunks of concrete taken out by the boulders.

If you walk up the street just a bit, there is a foot bridge that connects Amole 2 to Amole 3. This bridge was totally taken out.

This was the scene that greeted us at the bottom of our street. So now the top is blocked, and so is the bottom! We won't be driving anywhere for a while!!!

On the right side of the photo, are single men's living quarters. On the other side of them, is one of the main rivers that flows through town. They were so lucky that they weren't pushed into the river from all the debris that flowed through and around them!

At this end, the muck pile was probably up to mid-thigh for me.

Here is the excavator starting to dig out the river, so water can start flowing through the culverts under the street instead of over the street.

I should say here, that this happened on a Sunday morning. So we got ready for church, then put on our flip-flops and trudged through the mud, to get to church.

So this is now the other side of the slide. You can see our street, Amole 2.

So fast forward a couple of hours, and we are now on our way back from church. They have dug out part of the river so the water could flow, but now even more muck is piled on the street. So instead of everyone getting all muddied up, Chris carried everyone.... but me .... across the street, to the stairs that you see in the picture. We could walk up and around these units to get through. This is Gavin on his back.

This is a view from the top of the units. This stream was probably 6 to 7 feet down from street level. That's a lot of mud, rocks, trees, tires :), you name it, to fill that up!

If you see the light pole to the left of the picture, that is approximately where our house is.

Ok, so boys will be boys! Chris carries them through the mess, just so they can jump in and play in the mess, on the other side! ......In their church clothes!!!!!

We finally made it home, and started to wash feet...

Here you have it, just another exciting thing to deal with in Tembagapura. Thankfully no one was injured, or worse. People were moved out of their houses, but are now back in them.

If I think about it, in my very busy life, I will go take "after" pictures today and post them soon. Until then...

Slipping and Sliding in Tembagapura,

Robin