Flooding in Ecuador '12

Ecuador is a small country that is right at the equator and west of Brazil.

I lived in the city of Guayaquil  for roughly 7 years with my family, and today after reading a headline about serious flooding, I had memories of me navigating through flooding roads in 1998.  The flood I saw caught me by surprise, I promised myself that I would find a way to track the weather so that myself and my family would not be caught unprepared for strong storms.  Now fourteen years later, I read a storm from a online weather new source, the exact area I used to live in and other parts of Ecuador is seeing terrible life threatening weather and the news is reporting about twenty people have died.   However I learned that this part of the country does see regular flooding, just that it was worsened by the effects of El Niño and La Niña.

Here is a video from another area in Ecuador, this is a small town far from the major cities.

What is a Tsunami?

After watching a video online, I had the urge to read and to get a better understanding of what a Tsunami is and how it can affect us. I then had to interview my father, because he was raised in a small fishing town in Ecuador, where he had witnessed two Tsunamis. I remember growing up with my dad telling random stories about him swimming in the Pacific Ocean or being nearly attacked by sharks and many other stories that I had trouble relating to. Some of the stories he told us, were about events I would expect to see in a large budget Hollywood movie.

A Tsunami is a series of water waves caused by the displacement of a large volume of a body of water, typically an ocean or lake. Causes for this type of an event may come from, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, underwater explosions such as a nuclear bomb, breaking away glaciers, and meteorite impacts. Tsunami waves do not resemble normal sea waves, because the waves occupy a much wider area than one can simply see with our eyes. They are seen and used to be referred to as tidal waves, which occur with a frequency from minutes to hours at a time.

Please refer to the original source of the information and to read more about Tsunamis, please visit;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami

I have waited years for the opportunity to write about what my father had witnessed. I had told him that he should write a book, and that some of his tales could end up on the Discovery Channel or PBS. My father witnessed his first Tsunami in 1941, that was the same year Ecuador fought a battle with Peru and of course when the US was bombed at Pearl Harbor. My dad lived in a fishing town in Esmeraldas, Ecuador. He was with my Grandmother near the banks of the Esmeraldas River and his location was about one mile from the coast of the Pacific Ocean where the river would empty its fresh water into the pristine emerald sea. From a very young age he can clearly remember feeling a tremor, then watched the river flow stop. By what appeared to be an unnatural force, the water reversed its direction and was started to flow inland where the water dissipated until the river was bare. Fishermen in canoes, scrambled to jump and grab fish jumping about in the dry river bed. Then the unexpected happened, the water that rushed inland to leave the river bare, had started to flow back to the sea with incredible force. My dad saw a wave roughly about 30 feet high that luckily passed by him and my grandmother, to wash away some of the fisherman that unfortunately were catching fish in the dry riverbed. Several homes were damaged and or washed away from the wave, luckily this was a very small town with few residents, and casualties were very low. What he now realizes that this was the result of a Tsunami that was caused by an underwater volcanic crater that he found was located at the coast where the river emptied into the sea.

The second Tsunami that my father witnessed occurred in 1957 again in Esmeraldas, where he was standing on a street and he felt a strong earthquake. The force of the earthquake was so powerful that it moved the ground in the form of a visible ground wave that traveled from one part of the town to another, he saw a car driving on the road at the time and, it had surfed on this oscillating wave that proceeded through the town. There also was a wave of water that may have reached about 80 feet high and was pushing homes in its path many homes collapsed and or heavily damaged. By fantastic luck, my father was far enough away to not have been hit by this wave. He ran to look for his mother who he thought was at a church down the street, he heard a young girl screaming and when he got to the church, he was not able to get inside. People inside of the church were trapped by the settled structure that blocked the door that would normally open inwards. He pushed the door and moved it enough for him to look in and found that people were being trampled, stepped on by folks trying to flee the building. He then ran down the street again to his sister in law’s house. There he found that the kitchen stove was forcefully moved from the kitchen to the other side of the house and it had stuck my grandmother, which broke her arm. After that last event, he was on a plane a week later and he could see from the air that there was a volcanic crater at the end of the river that meets the sea. This was the cause of these two linked Tsunami events. He also recalled that at the coast that there were many clues to this volcanic activity, one was that he saw lava rock. He will never forget from these events of the size and power of the Tsunami waves and its unusual forces of how the water rushed inland, then came back as a terrible wave that catches everyone by surprise, which very few can escape its path.  I had visited Esmeraldas many years later, I was not able to see this underwater crater, but I am sure it is there sleeping until the next event.

Here is a video of other events that caused me to read and learn from my dad's history.

I have to warn you to not have small children see this video..

Why I watch the Weather

Here is something I wrote back in January, I made minor changes as I learned more about storms and weather history.  This is a personal account, and that I am lucky to be alive to write this.

The first time I seen unusually strong weather was when I lived in Glenside in the late '70s. I was about 11 years old, I was just home from school with my brother and we noticed that the sky turned dark very quickly. The winds gradually picked up from a normal 5 or 10 miles an hour to the point that you can hear whistling sounds and eventually the sound turned to a freight train noise. The house literally shook and when I looked out the living room window, I saw arcing wires outside just from the winds that hit our house. The noise got so bad that we were shouting in fear.  When the event ended, we wandered outside and did not see damage to our house, but we looked two houses over and saw that a large branch from a nearby tree fell on a work van in their driveway.  A little later we spoke to a friend who told us that there was more damage about 5 blocks away.  I jump on my bike to get there and saw a huge maple tree had fallen on top of a station wagon that was parked on the driveway.  As you can imagine, the car was heavily damaged from this large tree.

I would like to find old records of the event, but I am absolutely sure that this was the result of a small funnel cloud. I am sure the winds had to top 70 miles per, I have checked online and cannot find a recorded event of a EF-0 in Glenside around 1978-1979.  I think about what happened now and how we were really lucky that this was not worse than it was, but it seems that the mini twister followed a chaotic path, that touched the ground then would lift up again then touch down with more force a few blocks away.

The second event that happened to me was when I lived in Guayaquil Ecuador (South America).  I did not have internet access at time, and I was looking for a new job.  I had a former co-worker that was one of my basic Photoshop students, he referred me to the owner of an Ad Agency.  The day I went to the job interview  was a day of typical tropic warmth and bright but somewhat normally cloudy skies.  I was hired and told when to report to the job. (YES!)  Then first day of the job was a nightmare it was the first time I witnessed the effects of “El Niño Southern Oscillation.  I never heard about “El Niño” before then, and that it was forming that week off the coast of Ecuador and Peru in the Pacific Ocean.  My first day on the job and the two months that followed was a life altering event. That day I had witnessed about four feet of water on flooded streets. Torrential rains that looked like the clouds reached 400% relative humidity. I only made it to work safely because I got lost driving to work. By some crazy luck, I took higher ground. I instinctively drove to up hills and did make it to work. When I got to work I had found the owner was on the phone speaking to some of his employees who could not make it in, they were stranded on the flooded roads that were shut down by high water. The crazy “Gringo” (me)  and two other people made it to work that day.  After that, I was of course in shock. I did run into more problems, the rain did not stop. I think it rained without ending for about 4 days or more at a time. It got so bad from driving in deep water that the brakes on my car slowly disintegrated. I then had to take the bus to get to work for about a week. I then got my car back, new brakes I was happy. However my car started to smell bad from flooded water that would seep into the car. That was not the end of my troubles, I was driving home one night and it started to rain again but this time it was much stronger than before. I was on the final stretch of road getting near the house. I noticed that my windshield wipers failed to clean off the glass fast enough to aid my vision. I was driving about 30-35 mph and just started to slow down. The water on the road started to pond, I wanted to avoid hydroplaning so I gradually slowed down, but then the car felt like it quickly fell  downward. Like the feeling you get when you fall in a very large pothole. I could no longer see the road from the blinding rain and dense low clouds.  I guided myself by trees and the brush lining the left edge highway divider and on the right side was driving near a slight embankment that did not have a barrier. When the car fell, it bottomed out violently, two things occurred. The brake line under the car snapped off and the engine stalled from the impact. I tried to hit the brakes and restart the vehicle but the brake pedal sank to the floor board.  I did not panic, I let the car roll and started it, then I down shifted into second to let the engine slow the car down to then again downshift again into first gear.  At that point I was driving my VW Beetle in first gear, (12 mpg?) my wipers were useless and no brakes.  Imagine driving a car blind with no brakes. Yes I did make it home safe, I was the only nut on that flooded road.  I went through 3 sets of brake shoes, and two headlights as they were destroyed by water. After the first rains I padded the spark plug wires with rubber cement and the car did not fail to start after that. At times I was driving around with about four of more inches of water sloshing around inside the car.

I did see other weather events, 3 foot snowstorms, glancing blows from passing hurricanes, and ice storms, but now after seeing all this I have to say that you learn to have a great respect of the forces of nature.